Edith Collier: A Light Among Shadows
This documentary looks at the life of neglected painter Edith Collier. Whanganui-bred Collier left for London in her late 20s to study art; her painting flourished, experimenting with modernism alongside fellow expat Frances Hodgkins. She returned home after World War I to family duty, and ridicule for her art (her disgusted father set fire to her nudes). Interviews with her biographer and family, and shots of her work, make for a poignant biography of a (curtailed) artistic life. Listener reviewer Helene Wong called it “affecting viewing, with a sense of discovery”.
Kaleidoscope - Attitudes Towards Landscape
This short documentary series looked at New Zealand's landscape art from the arrival of Pākehā up until the 1980s. The four episodes moved from the development of a local version of the European tradition (through artists such as John Gully and Petrus van der Velden) through to the homegrown modernism emerging in the 20th Century: the distinct hard-edged styles of Binney, White and Smither, the spiritual abstracts of McCahon and Woollaston, to the later impact of Māori artists like Hotere, Whiting and Kahukiwa.
Len Lye
Globetrotting New Zealander Len Lye was a gifted innovator in many areas of the arts — film, painting, sculpture, photography, and writing. Inventing ways to make films without a camera, he became one of the pioneers of the genre later known as the music video. Later he moved to New York's Greenwich Village and became a leading figure in the kinetic art movements of the 1950s and 60s.