Private Collection, UK Purchased by the present owner from Temple Gallery, Dunedin

In this major piece from 2004 several familiar elements combine to form a work that, is to the best of my knowledge, almost unique in Hotere’s work in foregrounding the six-pointed Star of David, universally associated with Judaism and the State of Israel. (The Star of David also featured in Hotere’s lithographic series Jerusalem, Jerusalem of 2003.)
As with many later pieces, this work is contained within a salvaged, wooden Victorian window-frame painted black. Inside the frame is a rectangle of mechanically burnished and engraved stainless steel attached to the black-painted backboard with cast pewter mountings, again a feature of many late works. The metal has been cut and peeled back to expose triangular black shapes constituting the six points of a star, the points of the star being emphasised by the pattern of the burnishings on the metal. In the centre of the ‘star’ is a burnished circle.
Whatever the precise religious and political connotations of the work, it is worth remembering that Hotere’s attention had been drawn to the Middle East by the Gulf War of 2003, a conflict in which Israel while not directly involved was implicated through alliances to the USA. Passionate protest against the ravages of war had, of course, been a recurrent theme of Hotere’s art since the Sangro paintings of the 1960s. Carey’s Bay and BNZ Port Chalmers is less the title of the work that the location of its making.
Essay by - Peter Simpson

EXHIBITED Ralph Hotere: New Work, Temple Gallery, Dunedin, 2004