To walk into Mike O’Donnell’s pop-up gallery is to enter a world of intention and synergy, where cultures, nature, and history are woven together in a spiritual journey.
The Friends of Aotearoa gallery, open on Paeroa’s Belmont St until mid-October, is laid out in a timeline of sorts, with works from significant points throughout Mike’s life.
“This is 50 years of working myself out through clay,” says Mike, who worked with and learned extensively from late Coromandel potter Barry Brickell.
“And my relationship with nature and ecologies and the sacredness of our waters and springs.”
Pottery and paintings sit amongst protest flags and mixed-media pieces woven from natural materials. And at the rear, a darkened alcove holds a shrine, bearing the large clay sculpture Song of the Fish People: an homage to Mike’s late wife, Min.
“What do you do with anxiety, with trauma? Well, the artist embraces it,” Mike says.
“You do not run away from it. Because that trauma is a measure of the taonga that’s inside you, the sacredness. And so the key is to express that through some medium.”
Despite the sadness inherent in many of his pieces, the overarching theme throughout the gallery is of a quiet strength and belief in the teachings of the land.
Te ao Māori is a strong influence here – Mike has been embraced by several Māori elders and calls himself a “white Māori”. He subscribes deeply to the spiritual history of the land – but it goes deeper than that, he says, drawing also on his Irish roots and many other ancient cultures as well.
“[It’s] a way of being at one with the law of nature, you know?”
And everything is tied together by the waters of life.
Mike’s pottery studio, Tarāriki, is set amongst native bush on Old Reservoir Rd, backed by a stream. He’s spent his life listening to it.
“That stream has a whakapapa and an intelligence, and hence it became my teacher for 55 years.”
Song of Fish People in the gallery also sings to Mike.
“[She] is singing her waters in the face of adversity, and that’s the key,” he says.
“It’s in our sacred waters – a symbiotic relationship between our waters and the waters of this earth.”
Many of the older pieces on display hark to Mike’s involvement with environmental causes. He talks of protesting against mining, recalling his participation in cross-country hikoi and parliamentary challenges as an advocate for the environment.
“These were all pieces that have been employed… these were submissions, these masks are masks that we actually wore into council.”
But further along the timeline, the focus shifts.
Here there are works about creation myths, and Mike’s hopes for the future. And this is where his need to reach the next generation comes to the fore.
In his years as an artist, Mike has worked extensively with children, including a six-month stint as artist-in-residence at Waikino School.
“I taught them that you are this clay vessel, given the waters of life from which came the breath… The power in the room was so formidable because every kid there knew they belonged,” he says.
“When my daughter Emily was born, I was just, as a man, like, who are we to bring children into this world?
“I’ve workshopped [with] hundreds of kids and they’re the ones I believe in so much… This is pro-environment and this is the heritage of our children, what they inherit.”
Mike’s story, and the timeline of the gallery, are echoed in his book, Whakapapa of a White Man: The Reply.
“I write this out for the children, from a child within me, and the trust and privilege they have given to me over the years and my journeying with them, listening to their seed and their waters talking,” reads the dedication.
“This story is for the ones in between the old and the young.”
