Bone carvers to descend on Mōkau at Easter
Mike Brown does a lot of his bone carving sitting by the Tongapōrutu River with a lap table balanced on his knee.
He has been carving for 44 years, ever since he saw the carving a jeweller friend was doing and was instantly hooked.
“I like three dimensional form, sculptural work. It’s a medium that’s hard, but soft enough that it’s able to be cut with metal tools. It’s a dry process as opposed to stone where you have to use water and diamond cutting gear and it’s noisy.”
And he likes that bone carving is quiet, so he can beaver away and not disturb the rest of the household.
Since 2017, Brown has organised a bone carving symposium at the Mōkau Hall each Easter.
The Firstgas Mōkau Bone Carving Symposium has grown from 12 participants the first year to 63 this year, which is the maximum, he said.
Carvers stream in from all over the country and, for the second year in a row, some participants were coming from Australia.
Over the six years, there was a pause during Covid, there had been two Māori, one Japanese and two Pākehā special guest carvers, he said.
This year Gareth McGhie, Ngāti Kahungunu, was the special guest.
A Pākehā, Brown has been involved in lots of discussions about the sacredness of Māori design and the appropriateness of non-Māori carving them.
“It’s been a really interesting process of learning for everybody and people are becoming a lot more confident about what’s right for them. That’s been a really positive thing.”
The Mōkau Bone Carving Facebook page has around 8000 followers, he said.
“The vast majority of those are Māori. If you do something they feel is not right they will comment. That will get a discussion going and that will bring correction. We’ve had some of our people carving Māori designs without really understanding the preciousness of that design to iwi. Once they realise that they adjust accordingly.”
Pākehā carvers are encouraged to examine their own backgrounds and bring it into their carving, he said.
Over the years Brown’s carving has gone through different styles.
“At the moment, I’m working on a little series, quite a challenging series technically, but it’s looking at tree roots and how you can’t see the tree roots, yet they are the hero of the tree. They feed the tree. And it’s the internal aspect of people. What makes us cool people is what’s going on the inside. What makes us bad people is what goes on in the inside and that’s hidden as well like the roots are.”
No-one else is doing anything like that, Brown said, of his carvings that take more than 40 hours each to complete.
Some of the bones he carves come from the butcher.
“Butchers used to give it away, but now they sell it, because more and more people are doing it. You can get it in the paddock from a different animal. That has different qualities. That bone; it’s richer in colour and might have a range of little speckles in it which I kind of like.”
Cleaning the bones is a four day process; it’s a series of soaking and scraping and using a whitening agent to help with blood stains.
Whale bone is controlled by iwi. “One of my greatest blessing in bone carving was being gifted a piece of whale bone by a Māori guy, part of the Ngāti Maniapoto. He was gifted some whale bone and carved it off and gave it to me. It was extraordinary.”
A couple of years ago a little pilot whale washed up on Tongapōrutu beach.
“It washed around for a year. It was rotten as. It smelt terrible and people started to desecrate it, took the teeth.”
So, Brown contacted Ngāti Tama and asked for permission to harvest the bones and to bless and bury the body.
“A friend and I cut out the bones that were left. The bones were available for Ngāti Tama if they wanted them for carving. I’ve got them drying out and being prepared for carving. I haven’t carved any of them.”
One of Brown’s goals is to increase the mana of bone carving. While it was very popular in the 80s and 90s, an influx of cheap knockoffs from overseas damaged the local market.
“They had no soul and were copying Māori designs. People said ‘I buy one for $20 when you want $200.”
So, the bone carvers disappeared. “What we’ve done is focused on authentic hand-made with some life within it, what Māori would call wairua,” Brown said.
“This has enabled differentiation between the cheap knockoff stuff. So we’re now seeing the value increasing for authentic New Zealand-made bone carvings and that’s fantastic.”
At the symposium there will be a workshop helping carvers price their carving, he said.
“One way to increase its mana is to attribute value to it, not just financial value, but if you want it you pay for it.”
The symposium is on at the Mōkau Hall from Friday, March 29 to midday Monday, April 1.