Lucy Hammonds

This is a fine book; one of the finest revelations being the scope of the Hawke's Bay Museums Trust, Ruawharo Ta-u-rangi collection. The Images section at the end of the book lists all the images with their ownership. This is really helpful although a page number with each would have been even more helpful as would an index.

The illustrations are a brilliant feature of this book. Its shape however does not help when one reads in bed (!) and the black type on brown is not always easy to read.

The focus of this work is the home and aspects of the home as they are represented in the collection of the Hawke's Bay Museum & Art Gallery. It covers a wide range of angles of home - for example: looking in, looking over the fence, the face that home presents to the world as opposed to its reality.

Although the pieces considered are local, they are described in the context of New Zealand's art history and I found this particularly useful with regards to the development of New Zealand ceramics and the transition from the Anglo-Oriental pottery movement to the New Craft Movement period characterised by a more localised influence and the growing influence of Pasifika culture.

However I struggled with the inclusion of Ian Scott's Lattice painting no.46 and the justification for that in the section 'Beyond the Fence' dealing with large suburban housing projects. Perhaps Lattice no.46 refers to their 'subject matter of extraordinary complexity.'… (meer)