Photo caption: Raewyn Martyn, Camping Paintings (2015-ongoing). Work in progress at Cass Field Station, February 2026. Photo by Raewyn Martyn.
Those Days of Clear Blue Green Skies, will be held at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha | University of Canterbury’s (UC) Cass Field Station, near Arthur’s Pass, on 24 October, Labour Weekend, featuring artworks by three female creatives from UC.
The exhibition celebrates the 90th anniversary of Angus’ 1936 painting trip to Cass, accompanied by two of her Canterbury College school of art friends, Louise Henderson and Julia Scarvell.
The three women spent 10 days in the area, sketching, painting and tramping. In the months after that trip, Angus completed several works, including her celebrated oil painting Cass, depicting the red, timber railway station surrounded by tawny mountains.
She also painted Mountain Biological Station, Cass, which is held in UC’s collection. It was gifted to Professor Percival in UC’s biology department after he hosted Angus and her friends’ stay at the station.
UC Art Collections Curator Lydia Baxendell says Those Days of Clear Blue Green Skies pairs historic legacy with contemporary responses and includes artworks by UC Senior Lecturer in Painting, Creative and Digital Arts Raewyn Martyn, UC Māori Takere Lead Emily Howden, and Senior Lecturer in Sculpture, Creative and Digital Arts Louise Palmer.
“The show explores landscape, memory, and our evolving relationship with place through painting, sculpture, moving image, and poetry,” Baxendell says.
She describes it as a “powerful reflection on art, ecology and belonging in Aotearoa”.
The three female UC artists followed in the footsteps of Angus and her friends, travelling to Cass and reflecting what they saw and experienced in the artworks they’ve created.
Palmer says the environment at Cass is special. “Its history is evident in Angus’ paintings and also the dominance of the sky, the wind and landscape, which informed my work Cass Clouds, part of the exhibition.”
The video work, which shows seed heads dispersing in the wind, revisits footage originally captured during a field trip to the area with a group of UC sculpture students in 2008. It considers how places accrue meaning through memory, experience and repeated return.
Palmer says stepping inside the 1914 homestead where Angus and her friends stayed is very evocative. “It was interesting to think about how those women would have occupied this really small space for 10 days, in that isolated setting, making artwork, cooking on the coal stove and sharing the space together.
“When you look out the window of the homestead from one of the original bunk rooms, you’ve got a direct view to Cass railway station, so there was a real sense of being in that same space where that painting was made.”
Baxendell says it was important to hold the one-day opening event on site at Cass Field Station, where Angus and her friends stayed, and where both UC Science and Arts staff and students have carried out research for 112 years. The station is part of the Cass Mountain Research Area, land owned by the university and used for scientific research.
The title of the exhibition comes from a quote from Angus in a letter to Douglas Lilburn in 1944 reflecting on her time at Cass: "I have just finished reading through a story I wrote at Cass, descriptions have taken me back to those days of clear blue green skies, sun setting behind the dark hills, cold shadows, thin smoke from the chimney, ascending in a straight line. They were happy days, I long for a later return to the mountains.”
Those Days of Clear Blue Green Skies will be shown in a one-day event at Cass Field Station on Saturday 24 October. Further iterations of the exhibition will be shown at Aigantighe Gallery in Timaru and at Ashburton Art Gallery next year. Tickets to the Cass event are available here.
Names, Cass, 2025-26, cast bronze work by Louise Palmer. Photo by Matt Oram.
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