Artwork information

Mark Adams has long maintained an interest in multi-layered meanings inscribed within landscape by culture – through settlement and exploration, Indigenous and European - after colonisation.

In the context of these two panoramas, his use of photography as visual art is a complementary response to mapping and record-making: he travels to sites using his camera as a site-specific witness to points of cultural interaction or tension.

With the detail offered by his large format analogue camera and large-scale printing, Adams presents a visual archive of human encounters, although it is frequently absent of people. While he is acutely aware of past visual representations of place, encounter and the effects of colonisation, Mark Adams uses the present as a lens towards time. He concurs with Susan Sontag’s maxim: ‘the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.’

In his larger project surveying the coastal sites where Cook landed in Aotearoa and across the South Pacific, Mark Adams’s photo-imagery not only captures an image but instils a haunting sense in the viewer that we are witnessing of ‘a moment of change from which we cannot return.’ Adams photographically remembers the instant of meeting, defining it as a moment of encounter, violence, and reciprocity.

In his inimitable series of four multi-part photographic panoramas – two of which the Gallery already holds in the collection – Adams rediscovers fundamental locations central to the West’s navigation

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and early mapping of the southern hemisphere. He has documented what has now become internationally regarded ‘historic sites’ illustrated by William Hodges and John Webber; artists who accompanied Cook on his global voyages to Moana Oceania.

Adams’ portrayal allows us to compare their paintings, prints and drawings as visual artefacts from the past and to reassess the history of locations that are culturally laden by the circumstances of early encounter. As Adams has frequently said, he inverts the colonial gaze to highlight the complications of representation.

To add to the resolute issues of cultural locality, in these two 10-part panoramas, Adams depicts the prime global meridian established at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London where east meets west at Longitude 0°. Symbolising the site where the modern history of cartography and cosmography began, because of John Harrison’s revolutionary invention of an accurate timepiece, Adams reveals how the precision of chronometer time transformed the correct recording of maritime longitude.

To his northern hemisphere 360-degree view, Adams adds a panorama from Point Venus in Tahiti, the site and occasion for Cook’s voyage to the Southern Ocean, where he hoped to define the cosmological accuracy of location by observing the 1769 Transit of Venus. Point Venus (Te Auroa) is surrounded by a beach of black volcanic sand and is Tahiti’s most northern location It was renamed ‘Venus Point’ by James Cook, who originally arrived there on 12 April 1769 to observe Venus’s transit across the sun.

In both panoramas, Adams creates a photographic portrait of key sites relevant to our awareness of Moana Oceania and its mapping by European voyagers. They also mirror the genesis of the conflicted monuments within the history of European scientific rationalism that led to these voyages.