Albatross Neck: Landings by the Ancient Mariner and Romanticism in Aotearoa New Zealand 1770-2022

The artist, Nigel Brown, translocated from an historical context to southern hemisphere sites a series of portraits inspired by the ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. These images generated a response in poetry and prose by Denys Trussell who interpreted the Romantics’ ecological intuitions and social insights around 1800 – a time of emerging industrialism, war and widespread inequality. These problems are now critical in 2023. The Romantics spoke to their time but also opened up new kinds of expressive freedoms for the modernist and post-modernist worlds that followed. As we face the empty ‘metaverse’ of consumerism, the threat of biospheric collapse, and the weakening of constitutional government in many modern states, the Romantics, in all their limitations and contradictions, still have strengths to share with us.