Mike Harold’s Road to Oblivion is captivating. It engages the viewer in an almost depersonalised, bird’s-eye view of an historical moment, with a funky sense of dread. Harold's paintings and other ngā manu themed works are currently on display at the Rinitawa Art + Histories Gallery in Woodville for the month of November.
It is the fourth of five oil paintings by Dannevirke artist Mike Harold, each based on a stanza inspired by Bill Manhire’s poem ‘Huia’, one painting per stanza. Harold has lived around the stories of the Huia’s extinction and was intrigued by them, with a deep love of painting narratives. The series centres on the Huia and on the quirky figures who had the destructive role to play in the demise of the native bird. Harold's series boldly strips the people of any excuse that they didn't know any better and replaces it with characterising their use of hard-hitting marketing campaigns. The concept was a collaboration with Harold’s daughter, two and a half years in development, which began with a brainstorming session between the two at an airport.
Harold merged historical accounts with real events still playing out at the Dannevirke Gallery of History. The museum’s pair of taxidermised Huia, shot in the Pohangina Valley back in 1889, sit in a glass case and have been targeted twice. In 2012 tail feathers were taken from the male, and the thief tried to take the female too. In July 2020 the female bird was stolen. Police found the bird down in Paraparaumu nearly two years later, damaged, and after repairs the female was returned to Dannevirke in February 2023. Harold says the curators have since replaced them with similar magpie feathers. Harold and I both wondered how many counterfeit feathers were sold. Even in death, the Huia is still surrounded by such fascination, says Harold.
In Harold’s painted comic strip, the story goes like this. The Huia are first spotted by humans trekking in the bush, singing before the rain starts, a stunning spectacle that grabs the immediate attention of the bushwhackers. In the second panel the interest in the birds has quickly blossomed, along with the demand for a mounted pair. The human figures still look cumbersome, caricatured and cartoonish, laughable but recognisable all the same, yet the biggest figure in the painting is the body of a dead Huia, laid out and ready for taxidermic prep.
At the centre of the series, a slimy, smooth-looking salesman, slender and undulating, looks as though butter wouldn’t melt while presenting a Huia feather to each of the unconvinced Duke and Duchess of York, on their 1901 visit to Aotearoa. Enter the comical sheep, each adorned with headfeathers, fattened and green with both envy and money on the brain. "They represent the boom in the market," says Harold, "Those are the people – like sheep – who just followed the trends mindlessly." The fad that would soon prove to be an irreversible loss to the nation and a grave insult to iwi and kaitiaki of Aotearoa. Harold tells me the series closes with a painting that represents the very last deal of final Huia sold before its extincted status.
Many in the region share Harold's captivation with the Huia's story, and its echoes are everywhere. Another pair sits encased in glass in the foyer of the main building at Hastings Boys’ High School, showing how the trend was cashed in on throughout Aotearoa, not just within the Ruahine Ranges where the bird lived most prolifically. Across Tararua, many streets carry the Huia’s name as a suffix, and Harold could list at least six off the top of his head.
Road to Oblivion, shown here, depicts the speculative buzz of Aotearoa’s colonial feather industry, with all the frenzy of a Californian gold rush. It belonged to the age of empire and its collectors of foreign fineries and curios, sardonically termed here ‘Victorian passions’. A label Harold whips the curtain back on, exposing the marketing drive behind the colonial mana-mining. The beauty first seen in the Huia is now a spectacle for swooping fancies: tokens taken at speed, and soon to be wiped out. This panel holds the case of preserved Huia, once glorious and now items of legend since the extinction of the bird, with a single feather now fetching a disturbing $46,000 NZD today, the price of extinction ...
The seriousness underpinning the theme is carried by the palette. The loud, vibrant hues play against it, and in the end add such a depth to the language of colour: the almost lapis lazuli blues of opulence, the colour of money in the sheep mindlessly pandering after the trends and following along, and the violently bright red of the blood of the dead Huia. The black and white of the Duke and Duchess are the only toned-down part of the picture, the closest to sharing the viewer’s concern, yet their restraint does not match the brilliance of the Huia themselves, especially in live flight. A decadence of colour conveys the infamous message.
Even the boldness of the shading is done without darkening with black or grey. The colours themselves are used to shade, which is always celebrated in painting when done right, and I think this is a shining example. The choice matches the bizarreness of the trend, and I think it really speaks to the lack of thought to put the brakes on around harvesting birds. Harold has clearly painted one of the many threads among Aotearoa’s past with the Huia.
Harold says painting the story was fun to paint, without taking away the gravity of the consequences, which can be seen in the work. Knowing what we know now, we watch it play out along the walls before us.