City Amongst Tiered Cones

Shay Docking came to live in Aotearoa in 1965, when her husband, the art historian Gil Docking, was appointed director of the Auckland City Art Gallery (now Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki). This 1970 work clearly takes as its starting point Tāmaki Makaurau’s volcanic cones. The energy behind volcanic forms inspired much of Docking’s work in the late 1960s and allowed her to give visual form to her convictions about the influence of landscape on psychological experience, individual and collective.