Answering Hark: Caselberg/McCahon: Poet/Painter

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Exhibition date:
17 March 2001 to 20 May 2001
Location: 
New Zealand
Venue: 
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki
City: 
Auckland

This exhibition records the friendship and artistic collaboration between the writer John Caselberg (born 1927) and the visual artist Colin McCahon (1919-87) who created together a succession of remarkable works—including Van Gogh (1957), The Wake (1958), and Gate II (1962)—which brought together words and images in a unique fusion. 

Drawing mainly on the rich archival resources of the Hocken Library, Answering Hark fully documents—in many different media—the story of their fertile two-way collaboration. Caselberg supplied words for McCahon’s paintings, drawings and lithographs; McCahon provided images for Caselberg’s poems, plays and books. Each became for the other a crucial vehicle of communication and response—the ‘answering hark’ of a hearer and someone to speak back.