TREATY FUN
Showcasing Waitangi
EXHIBITS in The New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts new show, The Signing Belonging, are partly from academy members and partly from invited artists, including Darcy Nicholas, Ans Westra, Fatu Feu’u, Jo Torr, Suzanne Tamaki, Philip Sharpe, weaver Tracey Morgan and Linda Munn, co-designer of the Maori flag.
The exhibition, celebrating the 175th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, is intended to explore themes of ownership and belonging in New Zealand and refer to ‘‘aspects of multiculturalism, colonisation and transition’’.
Curator Anne Philbin intends it to provoke discussion and debate. But most of all she intends it to be fun. Annual gatherings at the Waitangi Treaty Grounds are fun, she adds.
‘‘People have the wrong idea. If you go to Waitangi, and every New Zealander should, like Jenny Shipley, and that’s one of the reasons I admire her. I’ve been privileged to be there with her and it was fun. Dr Brash got pelted with mud, and a lot of stuff, but the overwhelming feeling was fun, games, linking hands and people singing.
‘‘People should not be afraid of the Treaty of Waitangi. It’s a great thing. We’re so lucky to have it. It’s alive, not dead. I think it’s a great document and I love the idea we have it. It’s not a bad guidebook for just about everything in New Zealand.’’
Philbin, formerly a professor of fine art at Ohio State University, came to New Zealand 30 years ago to marry a New Zealander and was the founding tutor of Whitireia Polytechnic’s craft design course and an early director of City Gallery.
‘‘While I was at the gallery I collected Maori advisers to help me learn. Then I had a yearning to speak the language and took a job at Mana College in Porirua and started to learn Maori.’’
Philbin no longer teaches full time – ‘‘now I’m just a gadfly’’ – and recently curated the academy’s Flora, Fauna, Floribunda exhibition, which, she says, gave her an opportunity to get to know academy members.
‘‘With this show, people who submitted work have really thought it through. Their work is up at the top of their capability.’’
Invited artists, she says, are mostly Maori, ‘‘and they’re like a cloak, a cape, supporting the academy members’’.
The first exhibits that visitors to the show see are the huge wood-look figures of Sharpe, who left the UK to work as an artist for Weta Workshop. Sharpe, says Philbin, worked with a kaumatua to create the sculptures. Close by are works by Nicholas, Morgan and Tamaki. They are all carefully placed. Setting up such a show is not straightforward.
‘‘You have to be careful who you hang with who, what you hang side by side or put in front. I believe an exhibition including many people has to be set up in a way I understand and befitting of Maori people, set up in the way you go in to a wharenui, tangi, hui or meeting house.’’
Internationally known Maori ceramic artist Manos Nathan introduced her to this concept.
‘‘This way Maori participants and everyone else feel comfortable with something they understand immediately. You don’t have to drag them around when they come in.
‘‘This exhibition is from all over the place, even a couple from England. I needed to make sure all the other works were welcomed by the people of this piece of land. Te Ati Awa, Ngati Toa and Ngati Raukawa are the three groups I’m answerable to to do it correctly. They didn’t ask me to do it, the academy did. It’s part of the academy’s new approach to things – more communication, more open, lively and fun.’’
She says different materials and different artists from different backgrounds are part of the revitalisation of the academy.
‘‘People stayed away but they’re sensing a flow of energy.’’
Exhibits, some new and others on loan, include three historic Westra photographs, Munn’s oil and acrylic works on tar paper, Torr’s costumes, one printed with replicas of Captain James Cook’s 1769 notes about the transit of Venus, and Tamaki’s work representative of a flag shot through with holes, Four Star Land Grab.
‘‘Didn’t you just love it when Tame Iti did that? I did,’’ says Philbin.
Gareth McGhie has made handsome neck-pieces from horn, whale bone and rimu. Some exhibits are lightly related to their subject, like academy member Anneke Borren’s sunny yellow ‘‘stand tall’’ vases.
‘‘To me she doesn’t have to conform to anything at all. She brings brightness and happiness wherever she goes. What we’re trying to do here is be more open, loving, fun and challenging. I don’t think galleries should be places people are scared of. I don’t think the likes of . . . universities should be places people are scared of. I think public space means public space.’’