Peter Ireland

Peter Ireland: Sampling Landscape 1999-2005

These Landscape Samplers are a sub-set of Peter Ireland’s wider Sampler series, and combine the 500 year old tradition of embroidered samplers with contemporary painted surfaces in a project querying the landscape painting tradition in New Zealand.
All 32  works in the series are 300mm in diameter and are oil on paper.  Several involve “picture postcard” views of this country, but most are appropriated sections of historical works in the European tradition, ranging from 14th century Italian “primitives” to 19th century New Zealand topographical painters and 20th century landscape painters.
The sampler words are drawn from popular culture: common phrases as well as transport signs and slogans from the commercial worlds of advertising and sales and technology.  These create an unlikely but ultimately telling conjunction between the landscape tradition and contemporary life as well as providing an apparently light-hearted entry into a serious consideration of the place and relevance of this tradition within multi-cultural New Zealand facing the complex challenges of the 21st century.

 Peter Ireland was born at Hokitika in 1947. He has drawn and painted all his life.  In 1969 he began painting seriously and in 1976 made it his full time occupation, other than two periods of employment at the National Art Gallery and the Wanganui Polytechnic’s Quay School of Arts.
His work is held in many private and public collections: including Sarjeant Gallery, National Library of New Zealand and Museum of New Zealand / Te Papa Tongarewa.

Locally owned and operated, Private Collection, Wanganui

0800, Ana Poirot collection, Wanganu