Finding new streams in the landscape
In this week’s art journey, Mark Amery takes us on a drive from Foxton, to Palmerston North and on to Masterton.
The things that dominate can also be those we most take for granted. The lower North Island is dominated by the Tararuamountain range and large tracts of farmland. I took a summer Te Hı¯koi Toi around the Tararuas, from Horowhenua to the Wairarapa.
Aotearoa’s finest example of a museum as a living community space is in Foxton, or Te Awahou as Ma¯ori called it when they settled on theManawatu¯ River estuary. It’s a town today where heritage and culture are visibly cared for by the community.
Designed by Bossley Architects, Te Awahou Nieuwe Stroom opened in 2017 in a former Mitre 10 barn. In both languages it means ‘‘the new stream’’. In the shadow of a windmill, beside a flax museum – 150 years since thiswas the centre of a harakeke boom – it’s amuseum of bold design, like a vessel or wakahuia.
One side of the building is held by Nga¯ti Raukawa, holding taonga, displays and work by their artists, and the other is a national Dutch museum where creatives add Dutch humour, design flair and bold colour to interactive displays.
Leon Van Der Eijkel has, as a grid, a wall of brightly coloured charcoal barbecues (yes, really – an ode to the Kiwi Dutch oven). On the other side, there’s a work byHuhana Smith, a Horowhenua artist who usesma¯taurangaMa¯ori with science to address coastal environmental concerns. Spelt out by Smith in fairy lights is ‘‘Pa¯ Harakeke’’, a term used to refer to both whanau and to sustainable farming – the outside flax is harvested first to protect the younger heart inside.
Just like this, these two sides cradle in the centre a community hub – library, meeting rooms and gallery – while the prow of the space, with large windows, faces out to awetland harakeke landscape in restoration. Earthworks in the 1940s to aid farming redirected river flow, leading to serious degradation of the river loop.
Donations to Te Awahou flow through to restoration efforts. Lit pou outside, designed by Ivan Ngarotata, symbolise Ma¯ori and Dutch cultures intertwining, and include a puhoro pattern depicting the life and movement of the river.
From Foxton, the Manawatu¯ takes us upstream to Palmerston North. At Te Manawa, Matatau celebrates the 25th anniversary of Massey University’s influential Ma¯ori visual arts programme Toioho ki pitiwith works by this year’s graduating students.
It’s the video works I findmost magnetic: a slab of ice held between two people’s palms by Israel Randell, digital tukutuku shimmering like reflections on water by Kauri Wharewera, and Puawai Taiapa’s smart clowning, dressing up as rangatahi stereotypes, counterpointed by wisecrack text messages on the extinction of te reoMa¯ori. The exhibition is paired with collection racks ofwork by the late John Bevan Ford, looked over by his carved pou.
Photographer Catherine Russ’s Park Up provides portraits of those hangers-out in a car park high above the Manawatu¯ River: the Rangita¯ne pa site Te Motu o Poutoa, better known as Pork Chop Hill. It’s a sensitively pitched project, the social space for nefarious activity catalogued in images of rubbish: from an empty packet of fags to blue plastic gloves.
Nearby on The Square, Russ has reopened gallery Thermostat, finishing the year with earth paintings by Gary Freemantle with their own comment on the rich Manawatu¯ land.
The Manawatu¯ has been called one of theWestern world’smost degraded rivers, and swimming is not recommended.
Likewise over the Tararuas, sculptor and conservationist Sam Ludden highlighted last summer the toxic algal bloom in the Waipoua, which runs fast and pretty through Masterton.
Close to the river, public gallery Aratoi has a strong suite of new works: an enormous dangling Covid cluster-like chandelier of bulbous fungi-like glass and ceramics by Crystal Chain Gang; a party of crumbly pottery people in a gold tinsel enclosure by Sam Duckor Jones; and the Slavick sisters playing off the symbolism and taming of trees, Family Tree Whakapapa.
Whakatau Miromiro is embroidery on linen by Terri Te Tau. Mana whenua here (Nga¯ti Kahungunu, Rangita¯ne ki Wairarapa), Te Tau teaches at Toioho ki
piti and is part ofMata Aho Collective. Like Huhana Smith, she is in conversation with scientists, considering whakapapa and ma¯tauranga Ma¯ori while looking to ‘‘biological tools for conservation’’.
Visually and conceptually, she intelligently brings together inherited craft traditionswith the woven strands of DNA.
Te Tau juxtaposes colonial illustrative,
intricate hand stitching traditions depicting flora and fauna with their Latin names with intense, machine-embroidered DNA colour bands reminiscent of modern colour-coded minimalism, and whakataukı¯, Ma¯ori proverbs, which Ma¯ori scientists in genomics apparently use to guide research.
Te Tau opens up conversation on the possibilities of cell transfer for biological revival, and charges up nostalgia for what we’ve lost.
I’m taken back to the Horowhenua, to 19th-century ornithologist Sir Walter Buller. Known for his bird illustrations (which Te Tau evokes), Buller purchased Lake Papaitonga near Levin. Thanks to him, it’s now a beautiful scenic reserve, in stark contrast to the extraordinarily polluted LakeHorowhenua nearby.
When and where
Matatau, until January 24, and Park Up, until March 31 at Te Manawa, Palmerston North
Terri Te Tau: Whakatau Miromiro, until February 28 at Aratoi, Masterton