The Seasons: Michael Hight
Michael Hight’s new body of work The Seasons traverses Aotearoa with a focus on the shifting seasons, from summer in The Maniototo to spring in the Waitaki Valley. In Hight’s articulate landscapes, everything is in focus. The found intricacies of a landscape—sheep’s wool caught on a barbed wire fence—reflect an interest in archetypal rural scenes, predominantly chosen for their stacked installations of beehives, which have become central to the artist’s practice. Four major works ground the exhibition, capturing the essence of each passing season.
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Michael Hight’s new body of work The Seasons traverses Aotearoa with a focus on the shifting seasons, from summer in The Maniototo to spring in the Waitaki Valley. In Hight’s articulate landscapes, everything is in focus. The found intricacies of a landscape—sheep’s wool caught on a barbed wire fence—reflect an interest in archetypal rural scenes, predominantly chosen for their stacked installations of beehives, which have become central to the artist’s practice. Four major works ground the exhibition, capturing the essence of each passing season.
Beehives have dual meanings for Michael Hight. Firstly, they are a site of transformation. Bees venture out into the world, gathering pollen, before returning to the hive and working to produce what is otherwise known as ‘liquid sunshine’. For Hight, this process of transformation is reflective of the nature of making art. The artist, like the bee, collects from their environment. They return home—to their studio—before undergoing a period of sustained labour. For Hight, this transpires as thousands of small strokes of a brush, transforming pigment into image. In The Seasons, he has chosen to work with beehives ranging from honey-filled towers at the end of summer to the chopped-down bunkers of winter hibernation. They evolve with the seasons, symbols of pollination and regeneration, a vital and enduring part of our ecosystem.
The beehive, secondly, introduces an element of chance into Hight’s figurative practice. He looks upon beehives as found objects in a landscape, with their configuration, placement, colour and degree of dilapidation all in the hands of a beekeeper, the unknown collaborator in Hight’s work. Constructed by humans, yet weathered in nature, these found objects talk to the relationship between our natural and built environments. So too do the remnants and markers of rural life in Aotearoa—fence posts, broken-down farm sheds, crumbling stone walls. They are traces of human activity, complete with wear and tear, which are conscious of our impact on the land, but also quietly celebrate the everyday. By reflecting on the beauty of these changing seasonal landscapes, these paintings are in Hight’s words, ‘a testimony to passing time.’
