A montage of a selection of work from Return to Aotearoa the current exhibition in the Whakaaturanga and Awatea Galleryies.
Credit Liz Borrows for photography
‘Lines of the Tui’
2025 Ink on Wood, by Marcus Tatton
Marcus with Totara Tui in Process in his King Country Studio.
In 2024 Totara Tui was installed permanently at The Cambridge Golf Course.
Return to Aotearoa
Marcus Tatton
12 August- 7 September
A sculpture exhibition from Southern Tasmania and Aotearoa
Marcus Tatton was a wild King Country boy when he first enrolled for Art School in Dunedin in the mid 1980s. But after only 2 years studying there, he had his sights set on a Fine Art course being offered in Tasmania, where he studied from 1987 to 1990. Now 40 years later, Tatton is returning to his lands of origin, and bringing his 40 years of sculpture experience with him.
Artist Statement
Currently Artist in Residence at the Waitakaruru Sculpture Park near Tauwhare, Marcus is creating a body of work that speaks to rural kaitiake (caretaking) in Tasmania and Aotearoa lands. The relatives of tree families on each side of the Tasman Sea hint at ancient geological connections of Gondwana land forms. Tatton has been carving and shaping the Nothofagus, phyllocladus and dacrydium species that relate closely to NZ beech, manoao, tanekaha and rimu.
‘When I first got to Tasmania they were teaching the qualities of their rare and endemic rainforest species… I was going… No, Aotearoa’s native forest woods are the remarkable ones…. Then, as I experimented with the timbers, I realized that many were closely related… actually Tasmania and Aotearoa lands produce the same, equally remarkable woods!’
The people connections are layered (and many) between these lands too. Tatton’s great great grandfather was a ships Doctor and Dentist who travelled to Tasmania, then on to settle in Nelson in the 1850s. Generations later, around the time Marcus was born, his father Hone Tatton bought a mountainside of bush land at Ongarue which is now where Marcus is kaitiake and carver. As Marcus has returned (five generations later in this digital age) the connections between lands across the Tasman Sea have been reinforced.
These sculptures speak to myriad connections through wood, through symbol, through human endeavor. Each one of these varied forms holds significant cues to the stories of lands and their peoples over time, that leave us in wonder as to the untold stories they hint at, and in delight at their physical fashioning, their material treatments… and at the fact of their very being.
Bush camp in Tasmania