Jar presents: Time, Text & Echoes

Leigh Davis was a Trustee of the Arts Foundation from 2006 - 2009. Leigh's premature death last year ended the life of one of our most original and adventurous writers.

Time, Text and Echoes celebrates his work as well as providing a backdrop to the launching of his two posthumous publications. Stunning Debut of the Repairing of a LIfe, has just appeared from Otago University Press. It is the winner of the 2010 Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry. Nameless, the book and DVD, will be published by Jackbooks. When the flag poems were first shown - back in 1998-99 - they announced Davis's return to poetry.

But not poetry as we knew it. Davis had burst on to the literary scene in the mid-80s with the fiercely adversarial AND, the theory-driven magazine he founded with Alex Calder, and his award-winning first collection, Willy's Gazette. The idea of the flag poem emerged after a lengthy layover; during that time Davis was re-assessing poetry's printed medium, its ‘slim tome' commodity status, and its meaning in a society whose nature and self-understanding were caught up in often radical changes.

Time, Text & Echoes was inspired by Redemption Songs, Judith Binney's 1995 biography of Te Kooti

Arikirangi te Turuki, the great 19th century Maori leader. Just as with his Ringatu church, Te Kooti redesigned Christianity to serve Maori purposes, his flags - for instance, the ‘Te Kooti standard' Davis quotes from in Macoute - appropriated the appearances and purposes of the flags of the colonising power and turned them against it. The flag poem references these sources but it also reflects Davis's desire to re-empower poetry's media, so as to render it more vivid, public and urgent. In a word, relevant to the times. This required combining the visual and the verbal. For Time, Text & Echoes he called on the services of designers Christine Hansen and Stephen Canning, who helped him to visually realise his poems asflags, and of Blue Grass Flags, who manufactured them.

Jar is located at 589 New North Road in Kingsland, Auckland. A one-room street-front exhibition space specializing in long term installations, it opened in 2005. Time, Text & Echoes is its third project.

A calendar of the flag poem exhibitions to come and documentation of those completed, can be found on on the Jar website