Bill Manhire, who provided the texts for Hotere's Pine works, recalls the genesis of that particular collaboration; At one stage, while I was living in London in the early 70s, I sent Ralph a piece of poetry each week. Every so often I would put in the mail a postcard with the word PINE on it - plus a line [of poetry]…Ralph did a series of works - mostly stuff on paper- using bits of that text. I've always found pine forests really scary and interesting in the way that Janet Frame did. There was always a plantation near where we were living when I was a child. In that forest the sound quality changed - it was scary and safe all at once. - cathedral, underwater stuff. That was what was in my mind when I wrote the words…

The Pine works on paper divide into two series, the first a group of 1972 watercolours which are among Hotere's most lyrical works…The word PINE surfaces in each image, as well as an assortment of lines from Manhire and a series of numbers, 1 - XlV, which gives the works a ritualistic feeling.

A more robust-looking sequence of Pine images, from a year or two later, used woodblock-printed letters as structural elements in a manner more akin to McCahon although, again, the layering of word on top of word made for a more patterned effect.

These banner-like configurations of words, which the artist printed on the Royal Columbian hand press at the Bibliography Room at the University of Otago, also echo the artist's early Pop Art and Op Art influences, the handwritten words offsetting the weighty printed letters with hazy graffiti. Some of the printed letters are damaged, smudged, or they look as if they have been eroded by chemicals or the elements. As always, Hotere's interest in textures and the imperfections in finish is integral to the complexity and allusiveness he requires of his often minimal visual elements.

Hotere exploits the multiple meaning of 'pine', letting the word commute between the natural world and the world of human emotions and expression. Ian Wedde wrote in the Evening Post in 1990: Hotere has run whole series of puns off titles, and whole series and re-series of works off puns. Because of the silence in the ground of his work, the gestures (the speech) that play upon that silence can do much with very little…

The serious aspect of word play is a given of twentieth century literature with such pioneering figures as James Joyce and Gertrude Stein fracturing both the sound and sense of words and phrases to realise new, unpredictable forms. Hotere recognises the potentiality of even the simplest puns - witness the Pine series and, just as spectacularly, the earlier Malady paintings. His works attest to the capacity of language to subvert our expectations, to alter the way we perceive reality.

Gregory O'Brien: HOTERE - Out The Black Window: Ralph Hotere's work with New Zealand Poets, Godwit, City Gallery, Wellington, 1997, Chapter 6: Empty of shadows and making a shadow p. 49 and 51.