Roger Mortimer’s practice establishes a distinctive artistic cartography that navigates topographical, metaphysical, and cultural dimensions. Aotearoa’s familiar geographies, flora, and fauna are interposed with the chaos of untethered human forms that float across and inhabit the hydrographic charts and landscapes of the compositions. 

Medieval imagery and material culture resonate strongly throughout Sacred Waters. Mortimer has long been drawn to Dante Alighieri’s narrative poem (1265-1321), The Divine Comedy (c.1321) and the compelling vision of hell’s landscape that Dante describes in Inferno. Figure types seen in Mortimer’s art appear in illuminated manuscripts illustrating Dante’s text. The macabre blood-bath we see in Wakatipu III, 2026, and the monochromatic version in Kaipara III, 2026, are reminiscent of the passage in Inferno in which souls condemned for their violent earthly lives writhe in a river of boiling blood. The land is also unsettled by the violent disruption of colonialism, as we can see invasive hares and rabbits gathered near barren trees in Wakatipu, and in Manapouri, 2026, the Ruru, as kaitiaki, appears to swoop towards the floating figures.

Yet it is not only the medieval European imagination at play in the compositions. Mortimer’s artworks assemble diverse stylistic and thematic concerns. The influence of Buddhist hell scrolls and Japanese woodcuts lingers through the compositions in Sacred Waters, while the use of watercolour and gold dust in the South Island lake works echoes the techniques and ink-wash effects seen in Persian and Mughal miniature painting.

Beyond these cultural and historical themes, these artworks signal the artist’s interest in humanity’s affinity with the wider cosmos. The panoramic, almost celestial-scape vision in the jacquard tapestry work Kaipara III, 2026, transcends terrestrial mapmaking and suggests a more expansive consciousness bound to the human experience in the wider universe as the itinerant figures gaze and orient themselves in all directions.

The artworks constituting Sacred Waters share the qualities of a dynamic encounter found throughout Mortimer’s body of work. They open pathways to experiencing an increasingly intangible digital world while firmly anchored in a complex, familiar, and human realm.