Roger Mortimer

Overview

New Zealand artist Roger Mortimer has been described as a contemporary visual mythologist. His fantastical paintings and tapestries grapple with the big issues of history and humanity.

Charting terrains both recognisable and strange — Mortimer’s map paintings are visionary topographies in familiar geographies. They are metaphorical and epic stories of navigation and transformation, floating in luminescent and expansive seas - variously gloriously blue, rose-hued, golden or silver.

The imagery, in which Mortimer has framed his interests since early 2014, comes from illustrated manuscripts of the 14th century Italian Dante Aligheri’s famous poem, the Divine Comedy, which traces the poet's journey through hell to purgatory and heaven.

Beauty and barbarity and the combination of medieval imagery set on contemporary marine charts from Aotearoa New Zealand suggest complex local and global, political and psychological readings

The setting - complete with Māori place name, indigenous flora, finely rendered compasses or mandala and contemporary guidance for mariners including depth markings and gold stars marking navigation light - points to the universality and timelessness of way-finding and the human search for meaning.

The replacement of European settlor names on the maps is certainly a political act and an acknowledgement of Aotearoa’s prior occupation. Some Māori names some well-known, others mark lesser known places, mountains, rivers and events. An art historian observed that in referencing the country’s dual histories and bringing together European painting with Māori history, without any appropriation or borrowing of symbolism, Mortimer can be seen to be ahead of his time

Mortimer’s paintings have been described as “elegant” and “carefully rendered jewel-like images”, The addition of the ancient medium of tapestry into his practice a few years ago is a natural expansion with medium and content conceptually congruent.

Across both weaving and the painting, Mortimer’s practice may be seen to represent his search for a personal cosmology to make sense of global turbulence. As viewers, we are drawn into the quest to decipher the clues, codes, symbols and signs depicted in his intriguing maps of enigmatic landscapes.

Bio

Mortimer has Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Auckland, where, although pakeha, he went through the Te Toi Hou (Maori Arts) programme at the Elam School of Fine Arts. In 2014 he was the Paramount Award Winner in the Wallace Art Awards which came with a six month residency in New York at the ICSP programme. The judge describing his work as “medieval in appearance and utterly contemporary contemporary in intent”. In 2017, a survey exhibition was shown in public galleries in Wellington and Auckland. His work is a range of collections in New Zealand, Europe and Asia.

In 2020 a 160 page book -with large scale images and seven essays - was published examining Mortimer’s map paintings from 2009-2019.