Tag Archives: Michael Hight

Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: Kyeburn by Michael Hight

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‘Kyeburn’ by Michael Hight
from The Seasons, Gow Langsford Gallery, 2026

Kyeburn

Light rises, an ocean swell across the mountains
Heartbeat rhythm of the snowcapped range
Light licking the shivering grass
There’s music of honey bees and autumn willows
There’s light stoking the blue sky beauty
Rhythm of the hives and a person pausing
The light swashes and laps, and we’re on the Maniototo Plains

Paula Green

Inspired by The New York Times invitation to take ten minutes and slowly absorb the artwork they post each Monday, I created an ongoing series, the Poetry Shelf Breathing Room. Here, I invite you to breathe in a poem slowly for ten minutes. I love choosing the poem, I love slowing down to a restorative snail’s pace, to see what is experienced when we unfold a poem slowly.

For the first time I am posting both an art work and a poem, extra special as the artist is my partner Michael Hight. When I most need it, I walk up the hill to his studio, sit on the couch and absorb the beauty, stillness and extraordinary light of a beehive painting. Unfold a painting slowly. Last week I stood in his latest Gow Langsford show for ten minutes, breathed in the beauty, and felt body and heart recharge. My wee poem is simply a tentative bridge to the ripples his work lit in me. This gift. This incredible gift.

Michael Hight is best known for his hyper-real paintings of beehives in the New Zealand landscape, which frequently depict locations in Central Otago and Canterbury. Hight’s more recent works include dark, surreal dreamscapes that weave in imagery of objects that have a personal significance to the artist. Toys, musical instruments, books, rusted corrugated iron and other such items are set in striking juxtaposition to rustic landscapes, often with dark skies above.Hight has an exhibition history of more than 30 years. He continues to exhibit regularly in New Zealand and Australia. Highlights include inclusion in exhibitions at City Gallery, Wellington (2001 and 2007)—and his work is held in numerous public and private collections in New Zealand, and private collections in the UK, Germany, Italy, USA, Hong Kong and Australia. In 2014 Gow Langsford Gallery published his first monograph Michael Hight: Crossing the Line.

Gow Langsford Gallery has represented Michael Hight since 1987.

The Seasons page

Poetry Shelf connections: Michael Hight’s ‘Tributary Pt 2’ and a studio video

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My partner, Michael Hight, and I live most of our lives in self isolation in our rural setting –  writing and painting, and doing home things. We are so lucky at the moment. His studio is on our property and we own a tract of protected regenerating bush with a track. We are a short drive from Te Henga Bethells Beach but have chosen to observe the rules and stay at home. Early morning runs and swims, when the sun is barely up, are off daily routines until our bubbles open.

Michael currently has show on at Milford Gallery in Dunedin (until April 14th) – an extraordinary group of paintings where he matches a beehive work and a black painting to a New Zealand river. These come out of his (and our) road trips. We weren’t going to be able to make the Dunedin opening but it ended up nobody did! Now I am doing individualised ‘road trips’ as I look at Michael’s paintings (and as we write, read, invent, create, muse and ‘road trip’) from bubble solitude.

I rarely walk up to Michael’s studio and watch his work in progress. So when a show goes up, it is mostly a surprise. Each time I see a new show, I am transported, uplifted, utterly diverted by the experience of looking. I find the works transcendental, and of the greatest comfort in their mix of light and dark, strangeness, familiarity and complicated humanity. Yes I am biased, but I just love them.

 

You can watch a short video of Michael in his studio

Michael’s Dunedin Milford Gallery show

 

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