Grace: Gaylene Preston’s new film on artist Robin White is a powerful prayer for peace

“I knew what I was looking at was not the frontline of a battle scene,” she says, in Grace: A Prayer for Peace, an intimate documentary on the artist by another legendary dame in her late 70s, Wellington filmmaker Dame Gaylene Preston.

“It was a city, like my city. If this could happen in an ordinary street, with people living ordinary lives, it could happen in Epsom, Auckland. Why wouldn’t it?”

Later in the film, we see White moved to tears at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum during an artist residency in Japan last year. “It’s Hone’s tree,” she says, gesturing to a charred tree skeleton in eerie black-and-white images of the bomb’s destructive force.

“O Tree”, the title of one of the works she created on that trip in collaboration with Japanese artist Kei Echizen, directly references Hone Tūwhare’s anti-nuclear poem, “No Ordinary Sun”.

No other weapons have the capacity to wipe out the entirety of life on the planet, says White, who flew up to Auckland with Preston for the documentary’s premiere. “To me, it represents the extremes to which human beings can go on the dark side.”

In a piece of serendipitous scheduling, Grace opened at the New Zealand International Film Festival just before the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing on August 6.

The festival screenings were so popular that extra sessions were added in Wellington, Christchurch and White’s hometown of Masterton. Now back on general release, it opens in cinemas nationwide on September 18.

Grace is a typically idiosyncratic documentary from Preston, who wanders through White’s life using the framework of her 2022 exhibition Te Whanaketanga | Something is Happening Here, a sweeping retrospective that spanned her 50-year career. The title references the lyrics of a Bob Dylan song.

Known for her observational approach, Preston (Ruby and Rata, Bread & Roses, Home By Christmas) also appears in several scenes and in snatches of disembodied conversation off-camera. One glowing review described it as a masterclass in less-is-more filmmaking. The entire process was so unstructured that White never felt “directed” at all.

Fellow artists, the two women have developed a close friendship and have an easy on-screen rapport. Born in the mid-1940s, they’re from the same vintage, sharing cultural touchpoints and a similar worldview.

One of Preston’s early short films, Nuclear Horror Show Parade, captured an anti-nuclear protest in 1983 against the visit to Wellington of nuclear-powered missile cruiser USS Texas.

Bantering exchanges between them are one of the documentary’s incidental pleasures. At one point, White is explaining what drives her creative process.

“I fall in love with the idea and I want to see what it looks like,” she says. “So I have to make the work or I’ll never see it. If it’s good, it won’t go away.”

“I know,” says Preston, mischievously. “That’s why I’m here.”

It’s a small miracle, in fact, that Grace was ever made at all. Preston was struggling with the repercussions of a serious head injury when she introduced herself to White at the opening of a Rita Angus retrospective at Te Papa in 2021.

At the time, she’d resigned herself to the fact that she would never make another film. Two years earlier, she’d been bowled by a mountain biker at a playground on Mt Victoria, cracking her head on a stone path and suffering a chipped hip that affected her mobility so badly she needed a walking frame.

How life can change on a dime. When the accident happened, she’d just arrived home after attending event screenings in Colombia for her documentary My Year with Helen, following former Prime Minister Helen Clark’s run for secretary-general at the United Nations.

Preston had made a documentary on Rita Angus (Lovely Rita) in 2007 and was determined to attend the Te Papa event, one of the first times she’d braved a noisy public gathering since being concussed.

Spotting White across the room, she bowled on over and declared they should make a film together. A year later, the pair met up for coffee on Cuba St.

White, who spent 17 years living in Kiribati, knew Preston by reputation but hadn’t actually seen any of her work. What they recognised in each other was a lifelong dedication to their craft.

“A woman the same age as me who’s maintained her practice – I know what that means as a female,” says White. “There are things that can work against it.

“It requires a certain resilience, stubbornness, commitment and a sense that you almost have to overachieve. So I figured we’d have quite a bit in common.”

Grace opens with footage shot in early 2023 at an Auckland art collective where White and Tongan artist Ebonie Fifita are working on large tapa-cloth pieces. Within hours, water is pouring through the ceiling as Cyclone Gabrielle hammers the city.

The impact of climate change is a recurring theme that’s particularly poignant when Preston follows White back to Kiribati, where she and her husband Mike Fudakowski lived with their three children in the 80s and 90s. A collection of low-lying atolls in Micronesia, it’s one of the most vulnerable places in the world to sea-level rise.

Preston says she and White spent a lot of time discussing the project’s kaupapa (or purpose), which is set right from the film’s title sequence showing a photograph of the Earth taken by Nasa’s Voyager I.

Titled “Pale Blue Dot”, the image of a tiny, insignificant speck floating in the vastness of space has come to represent humanity’s fragile existence and the shared responsibility to protect our planet.

The youngest of seven children, White was raised in the Baha’i faith to view the world as one country, where the needs of society are more important than individual concerns. She sees her creative collaborations with artists from around the world as a kind of cultural crossover.

“I think my father had intentions for me. He wanted me to grow up as a serious woman who would go out and confront these things and do some good in the world,” she says.

“Both my parents were incredibly supportive of me going to art school; they knew I was serious about my work. And this is what we do, as artists, to make sense of what we see and feel. Art is our way of working it out.”

At the same time that White was at Elam in Auckland, being taught by Colin McCahon, Preston was studying fine arts at Ilam in Christchurch – against her parents’ wishes.

Born into a working-class family in Greymouth, she later trained as an art therapist before finding her way into filmmaking.

Her first documentary, All the Way Up There, told the story of a young disabled man who achieves his dream of climbing Mt Ruapehu. Released in 1979, it won special jury prizes at two international film festivals.

“I was supposed to get married; I certainly wasn’t supposed to go to art school,” she says.

“My father was an orphan, so look, we did not have discussions at the kitchen table about the state of the world. But over a lifetime of thinking, I’ve come to what Robin grew up with. I’ve come to it.”

Preston knew White’s early paintings from the 70s featuring scenes from small-town New Zealand life in flat blocks of colour: the iconic Maketū fish & chip shop, a buzzy bee in flight over a wooden villa, poet Sam Hunt standing twig-legged outside the Portobello pub.

However, it wasn’t until she was stranded in a “dirty southerly” in Masterton one day and took shelter in the local art and history museum, Aratoi, that she understood White’s depth as a major artist.

Along one wall was a 2001 work called Summer Grass, painted in 12 panels on the back of strips of wallpaper.

Evoking the sun-bleached landscape of a golden Wairarapa summer, it commemorates the 48 Japanese men killed in a clash with guards at a prisoner-of-war camp in Featherston in 1943.

“It was then that I realised Robin had an eye for the same kinds of things that I like to look at in my work,” says Preston, whose daughter is the actor Chelsie Preston Crayford. “There’s a clear observation of what we really are doing as humanity.

“The films I make – that might have a benign, entertaining surface but are actually about serious subjects – are the same kind of thing.”

Summer Grass was one of the first oil paintings White made after returning to New Zealand from Kiribati in the late 90s.

The wallpaper, which she found in the back of a cupboard in the old wooden house she and Mike bought in Masterton, deliberately evokes connotations of a cover-up. “You wallpaper to cover a blemish you don’t want people to see.”

Preston used a motorised camera dolly to intricately film the 6m-long work, which features strongly in the documentary. The raw footage was sent to the film’s sound designer, Melanie Graham, who created a soundscape for the painting.

Preston’s sister, Jan Preston, was also part of the creative team, composing the original music for Grace.

Still recovering from her concussion, Preston spent more than two years filming Grace and had to pace herself carefully, disappearing for the occasional lie-down before cracking back into it.

Jan had been horrified when Preston told her she didn’t care if she never made another film. “She got on the blower and told the entire family that I was really sick. She was really upset. For her, it was a measure of how serious the concussion was.”

Preston now regularly catches the train to visit White in Masterton, where a bed is kept made up for her. “People wander in and out,” says White. “You never know who’s going to turn up at our house.”

One of the most emotional scenes in Grace captures White being welcomed for the first time on to her ancestral marae, near Matatā – restoring a connection that had been disrupted generations earlier by war and land confiscations during colonisation.

It’s a hopeful note to end on, with its message of reconciliation between the past and the future. For White, the documentary presents a vision of unity and diversity that’s communicated in practice through her art collaborations.

“It seems to me the problems in the world are pretty obvious,” she says. “What is not so obvious is how we overcome this crisis and move forward to a state of justice, of equity, of balance.

“It’s all very well to talk about peace, but what is it? How do we achieve it? Because it’s not an event, it’s a condition in which one lives.

“I hope the film is a presentation of that, in the way we speak different languages and grew up in different cultures, but find a common ground to work together to make something that we couldn’t have made on our own.”

Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior lifestyle writer with a special interest in social issues and the arts.