Death rides into Dunedin on an apocalyptic horse this weekend. Auckland artist Niki Hastings-McFall has used a brush with death as inspiration for her latest exhibition at the Milford Gallery.
"Have a Little Faith" explores life and the inevitability of death.
"It's part of my recent research into life after death and reincarnation," she says.
"I started researching the Vanitas paintings - mid-European gothic paintings that have skeletons and skulls, flowers, hourglasses and symbolism about the fleeting nature of life.
"I also studied Renaissance painting, which is religious-based, with lots of crucifixes and Adams and Eves.
"It ties in with what I was going through at the time I started making the work," Hastings-McFall says.
"Having come face to face with mortality, I can say it definitely concentrates your mind."
The 50-year-old artist was diagnosed with breast cancer two years ago.
"They gave me a 50% chance of surviving the next five years. It certainly made me question my faith and mortality.
"All the works relate to faith. They're also about reincarnation. Or is reincarnation really about getting buried and becoming part of something else? I don't know . . .I'd say I'm an open-minded sceptic.
"But, everyone knows, intellectually, that they're going to pop their clogs some time.
"Focusing on death has also made me focus on my life. It's been a reassessment that every day counts and to do what I really want to do. To be in the now, rather than `when I've got this I'll do that and be happy'.
"It's actually really hard to live in the moment."
Creating the exhibition has been life- and career-defining, Hastings-McFall says.
"It really has been a resurrection of life for me. I've realised I want to make as much art as I can," she says.
"You have to make work from your own situation, but that situation is often shared by lots of other people. You can really only make work about yourself and the stories you know. That's how you get your strongest work."
The five works in the exhibition have been three years in the making.
"I don't think they're particularly easy works. Some are quite stark and others are fiddly, with a thousand things going on.
"But it's the same [as her previous work] in terms of using stuff lying around and junky, tacky stuff."
Adam and Maiden (After) reveals a skeletal Adam and Eve in Eden, surrounded by snakes, monkeys and trees.
Swansong explores the transition from life to death, while Papase'ea I and Papase'ea II use a waterfall of shimmering vinyl, based on the Papase'ea waterfall in Apia, Samoa, as a metaphor for faith.
"It's about a leap of faith. I remember the first time standing above the waterfall and being too scared to jump off into the pool below. But, eventually, I did. I realised then that you're better to jump and go in boots and all, rather than be tentative and stuck in the same place," she says.
Hastings-McFall was born in Titirangi, West Auckland, and adopted by a Pakeha family.
"I was about 10 years old when I found out my sister was actually my mother," she says.
She first met her Samoan birth father, James McFall, when he was terminally ill in 1992.
He died within months of the meeting.
"I spent a lot of time with him before he died from cancer two months after I met him."
Her subsequent relationship with her father's Samoan family has strongly influenced her life and work.
"Meeting my father was very much the beginning of something for me. I've ended up with another family that I'm really close to," she says.
"I have a personal interest in exploring the concept of ethnic hybridity. As a European/Samoan I fit neither culture comfortably. The work I produce is a direct result of this exploration."
See it
"Have a Little Faith" by Niki Hastings-McFall opens at 10am on Saturday at Milford Galleries, Dunedin, and runs until October 14.
