Denis Bourke's drawing and painting practice is rooted in a fascination with land forms and terrain—their shapes, processes, and evolution, both physical and cultural. Growing up close to Taranaki Maunga taught him how monumental natural presences can shape our subconscious and creative selves. He is drawn to iconic landforms and the evidence of human use layered upon them, aiming to reduce geomorphology to its essential, visually memorable form.
Studying Physical Geography at Victoria University, alongside the NZ landscape tradition of Michael Smither, Colin McCahon and Robin White, led him to paint the sensuous, earthquake-faulted Wellington hills. He borrows conventions from topographical maps and scientific diagrams—borders, coordinates, legends, inset diagrams—to comment on how land is measured and organised. More recently, he has extended this interest in physical evolution to the transformation of land through successive cultural uses, where human-driven change overlays the original geomorphology like a palimpsest, achieved through transparent and partially opaque paint layers.
He works in acrylic on varied supports—stretched and loose canvas, hardboard, and constructed wood panels, where the texture of joined planks reinforces the flatness of the surface.
Joel Cayford
His previous Mangawhai Gallery exhibitions of photographic artworks include black and white urban landscapes, macrocarpa rural landscapes, Cuba, Havana and Crete landscapes, and, more recently, collage and digitally enhanced cabbage tree portraits.
His 2026 exhibition is driven by growing concern over climate and weather changes, which he attributes largely to human activity, including fossil fuel burning—and by a wider reluctance to act, as if a blue sky and calm seas nearby mean all is well. The exhibition presents photographic collages and images made in and around Mangawhai that confront and challenge what we see, and what it means.