B.

Tāwhiao, the second Māori king, visited Elizabeth Pulman’s Photographic Rooms in Tāmakimakaurau / Auckland in January 1882 as part of a grand tour of the city to mark the end of his rule in Te Rohe Pōtae or ‘the King Country’ – a seventeen-year-long resistance by Waikato-Tainui peoples to colonisation. Having admired an impressive collection of portraits of other rangatira (chiefs), Tāwhiao returned a few days later to choose several for himself. At this visit, Tāwhiao also arranged to return in a few days for his own sitting. The result was this impressive portrait by George Steel, Pulman’s principal photographer.

The title of this tapa is a line from The Wailers’ song ‘Small Axe’. The artists use it to refer to struggles against colonial control in the Pacific, in particular Éloi Machoro, a leader of the Kanak pro-independence movement FLNKS, who smashed a ballot box with an axe in protest against the French territorial election in New Caledonia in 1984. Robin White and Ruha Fifita have collaborated on several tapa. White says, “We have created a hybrid artwork that integrates ancestral patterns and traditional design with contemporary imagery and pictorial narrative. The past is an anchor, a marker by which you can navigate forward.”Navigation is one of the themes in this work – the central shape is reminiscent of a vaka (canoe) filled with traditional and contemporary imagery being guided through the ocean by tuna (longfin eels) and fish. Tuna in particular are renowned for their extraordinary migratory journey from Aotearoa New Zealand to Tonga along the Kermadec Trench, locations that connect these two artists.

(Te Wheke, 2020)

John Henry Menzies first took up woodcarving as a youth in Lancashire, England. He immigrated to Aotearoa New Zealand aged twenty-one in 1860, and began farming on Te Pātaka o Rākaihautū / Banks Peninsula in 1877. Menzies’ interest in Māori art began in about 1882. He is unlikely to have encountered whakairo (carving) and kōwhaiwhai (rafter patterns) as living traditions until visiting Ōhinemutu in Rotorua five years later. Captivated by what he felt were endangered art forms, he filled two of three houses he built at Kiri-kiri-wairea / McIntosh Bay (later Menzies Bay) and a church at Little Akaloa with extraordinary Māori-inspired furniture and decoration. His most spectacular pieces were made for family members – this highly decorative pātaka cabinet was made for his daughter Charlotte and her husband Edwin Stanford.

(Te Wheke, 2020)

“The sky is second only to the sea as a mass that fills my imagination with awe.” —John Pule

John Pule was born in Niue and at a young age moved with his parents to Tāmakimakaurau / Auckland. He returned to his home country as an artist, poet and writer in 1991. Inventive in his adaptation of traditional art forms, Pule’s work considers Pacific and migrant cultures, often provocatively. In this work, the blue clouds may also be islands. He says:Blue is associated with travel, knowledge, family and scenes from the Bible, but mostly the blue is the Pacific. The Pacific collects and shares all that we know about ourselves. In that period of cloud paintings I incorporated Niue creation stories, islands, the ocean (especially crossing the Pacific going to Niue or from elsewhere to Aotearoa).

(Te Wheke, 2020)

Neil Pardington photographed this chair in a long-abandoned psychiatric hospital in Porirua while he was looking for locations for a short film. This is one of a number of photographs the artist has taken capturing strange and soulless places in which personal and significant life events are processed. In this image, time stands still and you can sense the institutional boredom, confinement and frustration pressing in. Pardington likened the kōwhaiwhai patterns drawn in marker pen on the chair arms to “a cry for help from within an asylum with no spiritual hope of any kind”. However, they could also be read as a wilful insertion of cultural values and meaning, a defiant visual protest against the banal hospital interior.

(Te Wheke, 2020)

“Though people may not see my work as political – it is. I want to re-ignite something inside the viewer that they may have forgotten existed; the ‘Pacific Island way’ of creating the world.” —Ani O’Neill In Cook Islands Māori, 'etu iti means ‘little stars’. This work was inspired by sacred objects from Oceania that are usually never seen or touched: bundles of fine sticks bound with feathers collected from Hawai'i long ago and now held in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, England. It was created for an exhibition in which artists responded to the museum’s collections. Interested in “passing on the flame to light new paths”, Ani O’Neill worked with the help of local school children. She often works collaboratively, empowering people through art making. Through this process she upholds Polynesian values, using her work to foster a sense of community rather than elitism. She also chooses everyday materials, and by elevating their status she challenges the western hierarchy of materials and art forms.

(Te Wheke, 2020)

With Lick, Angela Tiatia presents a balancing act between resistance and vulnerability. Filmed in Tuvalu, a South Pacific nation endangered by rising sea levels because of global warming, it shows how environmental, political and cultural issues can intersect.Because of the actions (and inaction) of much larger nations, Tuvaluans face losing their homeland and irreplaceable aspects of their culture within the next fifty years. As Tiatia fights to hold her position on a small piece of coral, we glimpse her malu – a traditional leg tattoo and adornment specific to Samoan women – through the shifting water. Associated with cultural responsibilities, sheltering and protection, the malu emphasises both Tiatia’s Oceanic heritage and the need to protect its people and their way of life.

(Te Wheke, 2020)

In 2008 Lisa Reihana was visiting Sydney where, by chance, she saw an exhibition of a French neo-classical wallpaper that had been printed almost exactly two hundred years earlier, Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (savages of the Pacific Ocean). It depicted the explorations of Captain James Cook in twenty panels. The exhibition label, recalled Reihana, “said how it was about the people of the Pacific. I could not see it. I thought that the piece itself was a marvel, but I just couldn’t see the Pacific in it at all.”Inspired by Les Sauvages, in 2015 Reihana made In Pursuit of Venus [infected], a 26-metre panoramic video in which vignettes of Pasifika, Aboriginal, Pākehā and Māori characters are superimposed over the idyllic Pacific landscapes imagined two centuries ago on the other side of the world. Reihana’s narratives of sexual violence, trade, dance, exploration, misunderstandings, conflict and violent incidents challenge colonial stereotypes, giving agency to indigenous peoples and adding nuance to colonial histories. “I hope that as a viewer you’re always trying to work out what exactly is going on in this work”, says Reihana. “Just like these historical figures would have. When you suddenly meet new people and new things are happening, you have to decipher and make sense of the world yourself. There will always be lots of misunderstanding – layers of misunderstanding.” This work is a panoramic photographic print derived from In Pursuit of Venus [infected]. It combines different interactions between English sailors and Pasifika peoples. While Cook’s botanist Joseph Banks – who gave his name to Banks Peninsula – takes a chief’s wife to his tent, two sailors approach some seated Tahitian women. One of the sailors coughs and spits blood on the ground. They smile and hold up two spike nails as a suggested trade...

(We do this, 12 May 2018 - 26 May 2019)

Dressed in Victorian black, Salome laments the impact of colonial histories on Samoan life and culture. A persona developed by Yuki Kihara, she is like a spectre or apparition, created in response to past events.These works are part of a series in which Salome pays witness to Samoa in the aftermath of 2012’s Cyclone Evan. In each work, Salome is positioned with her back or profile to the viewer, guiding our gaze towards landscape, environment, monuments and architecture – opening a space for us to enter. We are Salome’s guests, but she controls our gaze. We are not witness to people in states of shock or trauma, nor are we invited to view panoramas of devastation. Instead she performs in a quiet way, slowing things down and letting the juxtaposition between the dress, the landscape and architecture fill each image with a complex range of senses, ideas and emotions.

(Te Wheke, 2020)

Wiremu Watene Tautari was one of Charles Goldie’s earliest Māori portrait sitters – according to his descendants he met Goldie through the timber shipping business. Tautari was a merchant who ran a substantial kauri trade between the upper Waitematā Harbour and the timber mills of Tāmakimakaurau / Auckland, including one at Commercial Bay operated by the artist’s father, David Goldie, who was also the city’s mayor at the time. As a small boy, Tautari was present in 1841 when Ngāti Whātua gave the Crown the land that would become central Auckland. When almost complete loss of lands followed, he was active throughout his long life in campaigning for the return of Ngāti Whātua rights and land.

(Te Wheke, 2020)

Russell Clark’s spectacular composite mural, a modernist architectural relic, was created to decorate the foyer of the (now demolished) T & G Insurance Building in Ōtautahi / Christchurch. It was one of many murals by Clark, who was a painter, sculptor, illustrator and art school university lecturer. Against a variegated green background, juxtaposed raised amorphous and geometric shapes resemble fish, fishhooks and whakairo (carving) motifs. Clark has also used pieces of domestic crockery to make ceramic mosaics. Completing the arrangement are hand-worked amoeba-like forms in copper, pewter and brass. This mural reveals Clark’s active engagement with Pacific forms and his keen sense of the contemporary moderne architectural moment.

(Te Wheke, 2020)

Haymaker suggests the act of making at the right moment in time. It’s also a boxing term for a powerful punch. In this massive, psychedelic, sci-fi-like painting, Shane Cotton has gathered together signs, symbols and references with elements from past paintings and unloaded them into the ether of te pito o te ao, the centre of the Māori universe. Time, power, Māori culture and tradition, semiotics and art history all play out across these five panels.The carved wooden figure shown in the first panel is Arnold Manaaki Wilson’s 1956 'He Tangata, He Tangata', Cotton’s homage to this pioneering Māori artist he respected greatly. The final panel of the work is titled Staging Post, and suggests a moment for taking account and preparing to set forth again. Here Cotton acknowledges two contemporary Māori artists, both of whom feature in Te Wheke – Peter Robinson (the chain) and Michael Parekowhai (the doe).

(Te Wheke, 2020)

In this deconstructed tent, Pip Culbert has removed everything except the seams. What’s left is like a line drawing, or a plan of a tent at one-to-one scale. Culbert’s work claims space, yet sits lightly on the wall – much as a tent sits lightly on the land while providing a temporary home for its inhabitants. Culbert was a British artist who often exhibited in Aotearoa New Zealand, regularly travelling to visit friends around the country. Her ‘ghost tent’ evokes a sense of movement through, and temporary encampment within, the local landscape.

(Te Wheke, 2020)

“The thing about identity – it’s much more complicated than just being Māori or just being this or just being that.” — Michael Parekowhai

The title of this work recalls the old children’s rhyme that lists tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief. Chanted to suggest careers for boys, or who a girl might marry, the song removes all self-determination. The implication here is that for Māori the options are limited. Modelled on the artist’s father, Poorman’s suave appearance is undercut by the name badge reading “Hello my name is Hori” – a transliteration of George (Parekowhai’s father’s name), but also a common racist term for Māori. Parekowhai says, “I make objects that set a scene or present a stage on which other things can happen, on which the real art can take place.” Poorman operates on many levels – its visual appeal is quickly replaced by discomfort as we realise we might be looking at the subject of racism dressed up in a dinner suit.

(Te Wheke, 2020)

Across her career, Fiona Pardington has a history of working with found objects. This portrait acts to reclaim an image believed to be of her ancestor, Takatahara from Te Pātaka o Rākaihautū / Banks Peninsula. The subject was introduced to the plaster-cast technique of naturalist and phrenologist Pierre Marie Alexandre Dumoutier at Ōtakou during one of his visits to Aotearoa in the early 1800s. Often mistaken for death masks, life-casts were in fact made with the subject’s participation. Takatahara was known as a robust toa (warrior) who fought in, and lived well past, the battle with Te Rauparaha at Ōnawe pā (fortified village).

(Te Wheke, 2020)

Ina te Papatahi lived at the Waipapa Māori hostel in Mechanics Bay, Tāmakimakaurau / Auckland, not far from Charles Goldie’s Hobson Street studio. She sat for him many times, the first time in 1902. The niece of prominent Ngāpuhi rangatira (chiefs) Eruera Maihi Patuone and Tāmati Waka Nene, both signatories of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, she was well-connected and introduced Goldie to many other Māori who agreed to sit for him. Ina te Papatahi was later remembered by Goldie’s friend, the writer and historian James Cowan, for her “very likeable nature”, “keen sense of humour” and the “great interest [she took] in the painting of her portrait”.

(Te Wheke, 2020)

With the arrival of the motorcar, Otama-a-kura / Goose Bay (south of Kaikōura) became a popular camping spot for summer visitors. Christchurch-born couple Colin and Rata Lovell-Smith stayed there regularly throughout the 1930s, joining the throng heading north each season to camp, fish and relax – and, for these two, to paint. The results of Colin’s labours include a pared back evening coastal scene at Haumuri Point; and this painterly record of civil engineering works disturbing the usually tranquil Otumatu (near Goose Bay) during the completion of the Main Trunk Line in 1939.

(Te Wheke, 2020)

For the exhibition Untitled #1050 (25 November 2017 – 14 October 2018) this work was displayed with the following label:

“Land is essential to the Māori people because it’s been used by the ancestors for centuries. I believe that during that time, of centuries past, there has been a spiritual content left in the land. This spiritual content infuses and gives soul to the land and in turn the land gives it back to us and humanises our soul because of our ancestors.”

In this painting Nin’s inspiration is the Mamaku Range lying just West of Rotorua. Landforms have been simplified while an abstract pattern based on the traditional prow and stern carvings of the famous 200 year old Māori war canoe, Te Winika, has been overlaid.

Nin said, “I’ve taken that whole aspect of the canoe prow and the stern post and looked at it and planted it on my painting so that you look through the lattice-work, as it were, into the land, through into the soul of the land.”

Studying art at Ilam Art School here in Christchurch during the 1960s, Nin emerged as a modernist painter interested in abstraction which he combined with Māori culture. His time at Ilam “opened the door for me to bridge the gap between the Pākehā world […] and the Māori world. My paintings are a synthesis of the bi-cultural situation that we have here in New Zealand.”

—Buck Nin, 1981

Mission Statement was painted in a friend’s studio in Ōtautahi / Christchurch at a time when Peter Robinson was regularly travelling back and forth between Aotearoa New Zealand and Germany. Riffing off Leonard Cohen’s lyrics, he outlined a plan for geopolitical success as a contemporary artist: a campaign first to be waged in a suburb of Wellington, then in Berlin. When he first started exhibiting in Germany, he found that his work was in danger of being misread – or exoticised – because of its New Zealand cultural references. He made his own ambition to succeed in Europe the supposed focus of a body of work, casting himself as an enterprising tourist with a plan for world domination. Although it seems humorous, the real subject is cultural alienation and the difficulty of communication between people with different cultures and languages.

(Te Wheke, 2020)

In 1948, Olivia Spencer Bower spent several months at Rawene in the Hokianga Harbour recovering from suspected rheumatic fever, and was reinvigorated by the setting: “I was excited by the spirit of the old fortified hills, the mixture of the old Maori culture with the new, the mangrove swamps, the remoteness of the place and the speedy accessibility to them by launch.” She painted at least five variations of this work.

(Te Wheke, 2020)

Margaret Stoddart was born in Te Waipapa / Diamond Harbour. Her father gave the harbour its English name after its sparkling waters, and commissioned the jetty’s construction in about 1857. Stoddart spent nine years in Europe studying, painting and exhibiting. When she returned home in 1906 she brought with her a skilful impressionist approach to her work. Stoddart was a prolific watercolourist who favoured coastal locations. At her first solo exhibition at the Canterbury Society of Arts in 1911, most of the fifty works shown had been painted near her family’s home at Diamond Harbour. However, as a reviewer for the Lyttelton Times noted, “New Brighton has received a share of attention, and perhaps it is shown at its best during a storm, gusts of wind howling across the Estuary, bending the tussock and grass on the beach.”

(Te Wheke, 2020)

Rakapa Te Tira (also known as Rakapa Manawa/Ngatatau/Rapana/Mitai) was a rangatira (chief) of Te Arawa who lived at Te Takinga marae at Mourea, on the eastern shores of Lake Rotorua. Charles Goldie painted Rakapa’s portrait at least six times between 1910 and 1918.

(Te Wheke, 2020)

Appropriation—specifically, the use of indigenous cultural material by non-indigenous artists—was one of the critical issues of 1990s art in New Zealand, mirroring the other arguments about Māori land and property rights that were being waged in wider society. Michael Parekowhai’s monumental work Kiss the Baby Goodbye made a major contribution to that heated debate, when he reworked Gordon Walters’ painting Kahukura, completed in 1968—the year of Parekowhai’s own birth—as a sculpture in three dimensions, a giant kitset model ready to be snapped out and made up.

In the late 1980s and early 90s, Walters had been both vigorously attacked and fiercely defended for his earlier use of the pītau (fern frond) design taken from kōwhaiwhai panels in wharenui. Parekowhai’s Kiss the Baby Goodbye was an adaptation of Walters’ painting that both acknowledged the older artist’s work and asserted Māori ownership of its significant forms. It also brought the pītau design back from two dimensions into architectural space.

Christchurch Art Gallery’s work is a smaller version of Parekowhai’s original, made for his first major solo exhibition in 1994. Both sculptures share something not included in Walters’ painting: a final circle at the bottom right corner, which appears like a full stop. Parekowhai, it seemed, would have the last word.

(Your Hotel Brain 13 May 2017 - 8 July 2018)

Richard Aldworth Oliver was commander of the British Navy’s HMS Fly in Aotearoa New Zealand in the service of Governor George Grey. Stationed here from 1847 until 1851, his duties included conveying Grey and his officers on missions to Māori settlements. He also made watercolour records of the places and people visited.In June 1848, aboard the Fly, Oliver was a witness to the signing of the shameful Kemp’s Deed, or Canterbury Purchase, which saw the iwi (tribe) Ngāi Tahu forced to accept two thousand pounds in exchange for nearly five and a half million hectares of land, leaving the iwi with a little over two and a half thousand hectares – less than 0.05 per cent. In December 1850, not far from the pictured settlement at Purau in Te Whakaraupō / Lyttelton Harbour, Oliver oversaw the arrival of the first Canterbury Association colonists.

(Te Wheke, 2020)

Olivia Spencer Bower was often drawn to coastal settings, and painted this lively composition at a moment when she was responding with fresh eyes to the Aotearoa New Zealand landscape.After two and a half years’ study and painting in England and Europe, returning at the end of 1931, she had successfully exhibited her European work. Turning now to the local environment, newspaper reviews at the time show she was soon noticed as “one of the younger generation […] whose art shows every possibility of developing into something distinctively New Zealand in character”; and for the “brilliance and verve and a feeling of assured spontaneity” of her work.

(Te Wheke, 2020)

From her studio window in the port town of Ōhinehou / Lyttelton, Lonnie Hutchinson could see the volcanic range commonly known as the Seven Sisters running along the back of Ōhinetahi / Governors Bay. A pivotal work in the artist’s career, Sista7 celebrates this evening vista and the sense of belonging she felt nestled in the rohe (territory) of Ngāti Wheke, the hapū (subtribe) based at nearby Rāpaki. The spiritual and cultural values of Hutchinson’s dual Samoan and Ngāi Tahu heritage are firmly embedded in her practice. Hand-cut in black builder’s paper, positive and negative elements recall the fundamentals of Polynesian and Māori design. The rhythm of folds and the elegant shadows cast by the motifs inspire a natural sense of wonder.

(Te Wheke, 2020)

The dimensions given here are for one of this work's seven individual parts. The spacing between each part, and thus the width of the entire work, can vary. In this image from the exhibition Te Puāwai o Ngāi Tahu (10 May – 24 August 2003), the parts are installed 300mm apart.