Ancestry meets creativity on painter’s canvas
The future of artist Izzy Joy’s work lies in her past, writes Eleanor Wenman.
Art is Izzy Joy’s life. It’s in every part of her Wellington flat: paintings lean up against the wall, paintbrushes spill out of old jars. ‘‘This is where I do my digital art,’’ the 31-year-old says, sinking back onto her couch’s paintsplattered cushions and gesturing to her canvas – her iPad.
A small studio tucked away off the living room is a space for painting.
Canvases full of colour lean against the walls and light falls through one tall window, across an oil painting of an elderly Ma¯ ori woman. Her great grandmother Kararaina, a matakite.
Joy’s art has been in books, zines, and newspapers – most recently, on the cover of the Sunday Star-Times, where she drew the hands of New Zealanders working together to plant a punga.
It was created in response to a decade of tragedy, she says, including the Pike River Mine explosion, the Christchurch mosque shootings, and the Whakaari/White Island eruption.
But it also looks forward at what it means to be a Kiwi in 2020, living within a diverse nation.
‘‘To look forward you need to look back and learn from past mistakes, and build on the lessons of your ancestors, what they’ve learnt.’’
And it’s these kinds of lessons that influence her art, which frequently features Ma¯ori women surrounded by nature, protecting it, or becoming part of it. It wasn’t until her family started uncovering their whakapapa that her art grew into a fusion of contemporary and traditional Ma¯ ori art.
Joy traces her whakapapa, and her iwi, Nga¯ ti Kahungunu ki te Wairoa and Nga¯ i Tahu, back through her family, past her mum, her grandmother, her great-grandmother; back to Papatu¯ a¯ nuku, the earth mother.
‘‘My connection to te ao Ma¯ ori is through my maternal line. My mother, her mother, her mother. It’s where we have healers, matakite [seer], wahine toa [brave women], women of great importance.’’
She discovered the wahine in her whakapapa were powerful women, respected in Ma¯ ori culture for the roles they held.
She learnt more of her greatgrandmother, a makakite, and what that role meant. Her artwork had been meandering but as she strengthened her ties to her whakapapa, it grew.
‘‘I didn’t have something to hold on to, a purpose. I was just drawing because I enjoyed it and I didn’t really know what to draw.’’
It was a journey to connect to her te ao Ma¯ ori side. Growing up, she knew she was part-Ma¯ ori but hadn’t considered what that meant.
She grew up with a ‘‘white Christian upbringing’’, living in Upper Hutt and Masterton, Whanganui and back to Wellington.
As a child, she’d scribble or write little stories.
‘‘My parents – kudos to them – saw that I was obsessed with drawing and writing as a kid, so they enrolled me in an art class.’’
She was just 8 years old, ‘‘by far’’ the youngest, and started learning how to draw the human form by sketching mannequins.
Through her teens, she’d squirrel herself away at a little desk, boot up a computer and create art on the screen. It was the only space she had in a hectic house where she drew around the lives of her nine siblings.
As her family grew up, they collectively started looking into their whakapapa, past the colonising Pa¯keha¯ history they were aware of.
‘‘We’ve done a lot of ancestral healing.’’
Wahine entered her art and she wove together her modern illustrative art style with traditional Ma¯ ori symbols and concepts: moko kauae, ta¯ moko, Papatu¯ a¯ nuku.
Along with the lessons of wahine toa in her family, she learned more of kaitiakitanga – guardianship over the land.
If you trace your whakapapa back far enough, Joy says, you end up at the atua or god. In her case, Papatu¯ a¯ nuku.
‘‘When I’m creating art, I feel like I’m in two different realms. I’m anchored in the real world and my mind just goes off elsewhere, into the painting.’’
‘‘My parents – kudos to them – saw that I was obsessed with drawing and writing as a kid, so they enrolled me in an art class.’’