For those who have had the pleasure of meeting James Brown, Director of Föenander Galleries, they will know he brings a wealth of knowledge and a deep passion for the artists he represents and their work. In a new video for the gallery, James turns his attention to Roger Mortimer’s recent monumental tapestry, Oraka.
The work exemplifies Mortimer’s distinctive approach to landscape, overlaying marine charts of New Zealand with characters drawn from medieval literature. In his recent practice, Mortimer has looked particularly to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, placing its characters and narratives within contemporary Aotearoa to explore enduring questions of morality, society and the human condition.
The imagery within Oraka can be confronting, with figures devoured by beasts and boiled in pots. Yet, as James explains, Mortimer’s choice of woven fabric deliberately softens this brutality. The medium carries a warmth and tactility while referencing the monumental medieval tapestries that once adorned castle walls, creating a compelling tension between beauty and horror.
Mortimer’s move into tapestry followed his 2014 Wallace Art Award and subsequent residency in New York, where an encounter with panoramic tapestries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art altered the trajectory of his practice. Struck by the potency of medieval imagery at scale, he spent the following eight years developing a way to translate the inky washes and softness of his paintings into woven form.
Maps, meanwhile, have long been central to Mortimer’s work. While maps traditionally define boundaries, territories and physical location, Mortimer transforms them into something more metaphorical. As James suggests, they become a means of navigating not only landscape, but our moral and spiritual place within the world. This idea lies at the heart of Oraka. Viewers are invited to navigate its fantastical landscape, deciphering fragments of mythology and contemporary life as Dante’s centuries-old narratives unfold across Aotearoa.
Despite its confronting scenes, Mortimer’s work is ultimately concerned with the coexistence of horror and hope. Beauty and brutality, despair and redemption sit alongside one another, reflecting what Mortimer sees as fundamental tensions of the human condition.
Through Oraka, we are invited to find our own way through this complex visual terrain - navigating, as James describes it, through the horrors to the hope.
Watch Föenander Galleries Director James Brown discuss Roger Mortimer’s monumental tapestry Oraka in the video below.
