Danielle Mathieson: Capturing the Fragile Beauty of New Zealand’s Endangered Birds
Amidst the breathtaking landscapes of New Zealand, Danielle Mathieson transforms her passion for endangered birdlife into stunning art. Through her art, Danielle not only illustrates the delicate balance of nature but also her own resilience and hope in the face of personal challenges. Discover how one artist weaves together the threads of life, loss, and love into a tapestry of avian beauty and environmental advocacy.
There are two roads you might take for a drive along the Otago harbour. The city end of the harbour would usher you along a thin stretch of road that shadows the shoreline of the upper harbour before meandering inward toward Port Chalmers. The other road follows the Peninsula side of the cycle loop until it opens into hills and the towering, windswept headland of the Otago Peninsula. The Peninsula is steeped in Maori history and continues to be important for Maori, as the headland was the site of the historic Pukekura Pa for over two hundred years.
More recently, the headland has become internationally renowned for being the only mainland communal roosting and breeding spot for the Northern Royal albatross. While it has sheltering nesting spaces in the grasses, it is the updraughts from the blustery Southern Ocean winds that make this peninsula such a beckoning haven for Royal albatrosses. When the winds come and deflect off the cliffs, the Royal albatrosses use the wind as a source of natural energy for soaring. For one of the world’s largest wing-spanned birds, soaring and gliding allows these majestic birds to use the energy of only twice their resting state. Albatrosses will also take advantage of the eddies of air rising from large sailing boats or the stern of a ship to buoy them along in their search for food. Concerningly, many of these vessels are also the most perilous threat to the Royal albatrosses’ survival, establishing the Northern Royal as a Nationally Vulnerable species. Each year, hundreds of albatrosses are killed by southern and subantarctic fisheries, becoming trapped in nets on trawl vessels as they go after the fish that have fallen from the nets, or diving into the baited hooks of longlines.
In the shadowed, bush clad hills on the city end of the harbour, one of Dunedin’s artists, Danielle Mathieson, has a live stream of Otago’s Royal albatross communal roosting spot, as a constant visual backdrop to her everyday life. A wild ground of beauty to which her gaze is naturally often pulled when the wind blows in from the south west, bringing with it flights of Northern Royal albatrosses. Her love of New Zealand’s Northern Royal albatross, alongside her lifelong passion for giving voice to our endangered birdlife through her artwork led Danielle to draw, in black and white, a hauntingly beautiful drawing of the Northern Royal albatross soaring low over the Southern Ocean. The art piece is long enough to include their true to scale wingspan of three metres, each feather exquisitely detailed. Hidden deftly within the drawing are images of the human actions that threaten their life on a daily basis. Looking closely, you might notice pieces of discarded plastic, long line fishing hooks, fishing cables and netting.
Often standing in the margin between our current world and the copious bird life that until very recently inhabited Aotearoa, Danielle weaves the spirit of many of the known 51 bird species that have recently become extinct back into her drawings. While a number of her drawings are beautiful laments to the indigenous birds that have now disappeared, other drawings carry urgent and beautiful messages to save a bird species that is on the verge of extinction. Last year her drawing, entitled Time, Tara iti, and a Turning Tide, was chosen to be exhibited in the Cleveland National Arts Awards held in Dunedin. Her drawing details Aotearoa’s smallest tern and most endangered indigenous breeding bird, the tara iti – fairy tern – which constructs its tiny, shell-concealed nests on exposed sand dunes or sparse salt marshes where shells gather above high water. Predators, coastal development, human activities and extreme weather patterns had diminished the fairy tern’s numbers to fewer than 40 birds. However, recent recovery programmes are offering some hope for our daintiest, fairy-footed taonga.
While human behaviour is a major contributor to the loss of so many indigenous birds, Danielle has a way of giving character to each bird and, gazing at her drawings, you can find emotions of tenderness, awe, sadness, love, joy, and vulnerability arising in response to each drawing.
These are similar layers of feeling that arose for Danielle when she began drawing the birds that inhabited her Palm Beach home valley on Waiheke Island where she, her partner David and two children, Juliet and Leo, lived for many years.
During that time, and 8 months after the birth of her son Leonardo, Danielle began drawing, following a shock diagnosis of metastatic cancer and the inevitable surgery, chemotherapy treatment and radiotherapy that followed. Forced to rest and inhabit each day in a new way, she set up painting and drawing easels for both herself and her two young children on the bush-enclosed veranda. Here they came to know, draw, and love intimately the daily routines and calls of each bird. The way a kererū would come to land on the karaka tree each morning, often misjudging the ability of a small branch to hold its weight, and its ungainly gymnastics as it tried to feast on the orange berries before the branch gave way.
While the effects of the cancer therapy turned upside down every dimension of her life, it also refined and revealed what was incalculably tender, funny, humble, beautiful, wistful and interconnected about it too.
A challenge Danielle was happy to move closer toward was putting down her drawing pencil for a while to paint on a large canvas the small things reflecting the lingering beauty of the garden around her. Using test pots of house paint, she brushed onto her canvas the fragrant sweet Juliet rose and plants that had woven themselves through the veranda railings, alongside the visiting birds and other creatures that Juliet and Leo had befriended.
Drawing the bird life and fauna around her became a natural response to the intrusion and exhaustion of treatment. Turning her gaze outward helped her to diminish the forces of worry and pain, by tuning in to the deep base note and aliveness of the natural world around her. It became a way of not only coping, but restoring a sense of hope.
Around this same time in the year of Danielle’s first chemotherapy treatment, a new drug, Herceptin, was being researched to improve the survival rates for women with HER2 receptor positive cancer. Danielle’s partner David took on the role of advocating for her to be a part of the first NZ clinical trial, given she was the mother of their two young children and her initial prognosis indicated a survival time of around one to two years. After a series of medical tests and midnight phone calls to the U.S, it was confirmed that she could participate, with minutes to spare, before applications closed. On that day, David reassured her that she would not only be around to see her children start their first day of school, she would be there for their high school graduation day, and possibly any tertiary graduation, too.
Shifting over from the initial more brutal chemotherapy to Herceptin meant normal daily challenges became doable once again. Over the following years, in between regular treatment journeys to Auckland hospital, Danielle was able to return to working part time as a landscape designer. And, in her spare time, she focused on designing and creating safe havens with Juliet, Leo and David for endangered native species and birds on the island, as habitat loss is a significant contributing factor to many of Aotearoa’s species, and birds’ extinction risk. Danielle, with the help of her children and partner, also embarked on painting a large, colourful mural on a grey concrete wall of native species, including invertebrates and the local bird life, down at the busy Palm beach corner café Arcadia on Waiheke Island.
These days, the air is alive with a uniquely melodious South island dawn chorus when Danielle wakes each morning in her family’s more recent home that looks out onto the Otago Peninsula. Pressed into the hills above her, the canopy of trees is so thick they almost pulsate with mana, and the acoustics of bellbirds (korimako), tuis, grey warblers (riroriro), piwakawaka, song thrushes (manu-kai-hua-rakau) and wax-eyes (tauhou) announcing the essence of morning.
Twenty-two years have passed since Danielle’s initial diagnosis and treatment for metastatic cancer, when it was suggested that it was likely she would not see her four year old daughter attend her first day of school. While her chemotherapy treatments have been discontinued because of the well-known phenomenon of drug resistance, true to David’s word, she watched her daughter Juliet graduate earlier this year from Otago university, with a Bachelor’s degree in Biological Science.
On some mornings these days, Danielle can feel as though she is wading through molasses, but on the good days she feels goosebumps of joy on waking to the song thrush, tuis and bellbirds inhabiting their garden. Holding a freshly brewed coffee, she turns her artist’s lens toward her easel in the unfolding light, drawing exquisitely into being another indigenous bird which is needing our collective kaitiakitanga (guardianship, and protection).
One thing that would move and inspire anyone about Danielle is the strong and hopeful way she conveys through her art and her daily life how the natural world is always communicating to us with an intensity of aliveness, in the face of living with her own terminal illness. While ingeniously weaving in to her drawings the urgent vulnerability of many of our species and birds, she holds this theme in a larger nest of appreciation of our kinship with the natural world, and her awe for the gift of life; for the beauty and reciprocity of mauri in the flying, breathing, beckoning, buzzing, and unfolding world around her. And feeling a simplicity of gratitude in that.
Kaaren Frater
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