In 1982 Marilynn Webb NZOM (1937–2021) produced a portfolio of prints titled ‘Taste Before Eating’, featuring the artist’s illustrations and ‘recipes’ for dishes that included Mining Crumble, High Country Flambé and Aramoana Soup. A cook would need a dead albatross, swan, slug, penguin, seal and assorted other perished sea creatures to make the latter, but all would have been found in abundance near the coastal settlement, were the new aluminium smelter to be constructed on the site, as was being proposed in the early 1980s.

The modest work appropriates the community cookbook project as a form of protest, and it encapsulates the political commitment that underpinned Webb’s work throughout her long career. She is best known for her pastel and linocut landscapes, but was insistent that her work has “nothing to do with drawing landscape, it’s to do with connection.” Folded in the hills, a retrospective exhibition of the late artist’s practice, co-curated by Lucy Hammonds, Lauren Gutsell and Bridget Reweti, explores these many connections, Webb’s environmentalism, and her prescient understanding of the land as a living and fragile habitat at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery over the summer. 

A new, bilingual publication with essays by each of the curators and poems by Cilla McQueen, Hone Tuwhare, essa may ranapiri and Ruby Solly will accompany the exhibition.