Taranaki

Taranaki depicts a co-operative dairy factory in Midhirst, the tiny farming community in north Taranaki. Christopher Perkins noticed the way the almost perfectly conical form of Mount Taranaki dominated the surrounding landscape.

Aware of how the 19th-century Japanese artist Hokusai paid homage to Fujiyama, Perkins fuses elements of Japanese ukiyo-e design into his painting, flattening the forms into geometric planes and intersecting diagonal lines. His reduction of the scene to such simplified elements converts Mount Taranaki into a symbol of the region’s identity.

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