It’s said ― in the quiet between buses, down the back of the pub, in the hushed elevator rising to the penthouse ― that in the late twentieth century an unstable grouping of scholars, writers and fanatics from several Ngai Tahu hapu in Murihiku created what has come to be known as the Ark of Arks.
It’s said that this project aimed to catalogue all known arks from the last five millennia. It was a failed attempt to capture previous civilisations’ failed attempts to preserve whatever was valuable to them: waka huia, time capsules, caches, burial ships, seed banks.
The fifth in the ground-breaking korero series conceived and edited by Lloyd Jones, Little Doomsdays is another rich collaboration between an artist and a writer. This time legendary musician and painter Phil Dadson responds to a wildly innovative text that’s steeped in te ao Maori by Ngai Tahu writer Nic Low.
Nic Low (Ngai Tahu) is the partnerships editor at NZ Geographic magazine and the former programme director of WORD Christchurch. An author of short fiction, essays and criticism, his writing on wilderness, technology and race has been widely published and anthologised on both sides of the Tasman. His story collection Arms Race (2014) was shortlisted for the Readings Prize and the Queensland Literary Awards. Uprising (2021) details his walking expeditions exploring the Ngai Tahu history of the Southern Alps. It received the CLNZ Writers’ Award and the Wily Prize, was shortlisted for the New Zealand Heritage Book Awards, and was named a New Zealand Listener and Australian Book Review Book of the Year.
Phil Dadson ONZM is a transdisciplinary artist, musician/composer and improviser, whose practice spans some 50 years. He is the founder of the acclaimed music/performance group From Scratch. He was a lecturer in Intermedia at the Elam School of Fine Arts from 1977 to 2001, when he left to take up full-time art practice. He is a New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate, and has been awarded an Antarctic Artist Fellowship and a grant from the Fulbright-Wallace Arts Trust. Dadson lives in Tamaki Makaurau Auckland and is represented by Trish Clark Gallery.
