Glitter and pearls: connecting with nature
Sinead Overbye visits Page Galleries to find two contemporary Māori artists showcasing how interlinked the environment is with our experiences of the world.
Acommon theme I’ve noticed in contemporary Māori art is how artists draw inspiration from te taiao and ngā tohu whenua (the nature and its landmarks). It makes sense – as Māori, we see everything as being connected to each other and, therefore, nature is an element of life that is inseparable from our life as humans.
The current exhibitions at Page Galleries feature works by two prominent contemporary Māori artists who showcase how interlinked the environment is with our histories, identities and experiences of the world.
Reuben Paterson’s latest exhibition, KINGDOMS, is an exploration of celestial navigation. Paterson explores the two environmental kingdoms of sea and sky, using whetū (stars) to draw these realms together. His paintings are captivating – large works with bright coloured shapes against dark glittering backgrounds, which shimmer as you move around the room. Paterson isn’t the only contemporary Māori artist to use glitter in his works – as I wrote earlier this year, Maioha Kara also used glitter in her works at Pātaka Art + Museum, evoking a sense of boundlessness and a connection to spiritual realms. These commonalities make sense to me. When we experience te ao Māori, and Māori philosophies of being in relation, there are so many dimensions that we feel rather than see. Glitter seems to be an apt way to portray these things – looking at the works, we feel much more beyond what we can see on the surface.
While there is surely a wairua element to Paterson’s works, the constellations in his works are purposefully constructed to accurately depict some of the constellations that were used by Māori and Pacific voyagers to navigate across oceans.
“I have replicated the main guiding constellations in the southern sky that were used to navigate Māori to Aotearoa. Every work contains a Pacific pearl sourced from Aitutaki in the Cook Islands,” says Paterson.
This multimedia exploration of galaxies creates a powerful illusion of staring at a constellation from afar. He has also personified the constellation of Leo in some paintings. The lion of Leo is adorned with kiri tuhi tattoos and tā moko in bright colours.
This mixture of different astrological knowledge systems reflects how Māori exist within the contemporary world, with knowledges from Western and Māori cultures colliding. We are a product of multiple knowledge systems at once. This is a contemporary Māori reality.
Paterson also explores the realm of the ocean through his coral paintings. The brightness of the coral addresses how some species of coral are becoming more fluorescent due to rising water temperatures.
Overlaying the coral are various constellations created from pearls. Observing these works, it is as if we are staring through water, perceiving both what is underneath the water’s surface and what is reflected by it.
As a viewer, the most powerful thing about these works is the way they collapse different periods of time into one another. We see the constellations as our ancestors saw them, and the coral as our descendants will see it
.
Turumeke Harrington’s exhibition FELLED also draws upon imagery from nature, collapsing the past and the present into various depictions of tumu or stumps. FELLED consists of various works Harrington made while in the process of creating her current Courtenay Place lightbox installation SWAMPED, which is on display until June 3.
Harrington explores the history of Te Aro Pā, one of the two largest pā in the Wellington area until the 1800s. The original inhabitants of this area included Ngāti Mutunga, Taranaki and Ngāti Ruanui.
Europeans had negotiated for land in other areas in the wider region – such as with Ngāti Toa in Porirua – and mistook those negotiations for permission to inhabit the entire Wellington Harbour.
Europeans’ decisions to move their makeshift settlements into Thorndon and Te Aro were highly contested by Māori in the area. European settlers moved in regardless, eventually overwhelming the Māori in the area by sheer numbers, and thus establishing a township in what was previously a swampland.
Harrington’s tumu reference the survey pegs that were removed by Māori in protest, and also recall the swampland upon which Wellington was built. The tumu, however, are trees rather than mere pegs.
This brings to mind the deforestation that happened as a result of colonisation. But it also evokes the possibility of reforestation and regrowth – and a reassertion that Māori have always occupied this whenua, in spite of our homes and people being ‘felled’ by European occupation.
Harrington’s stumps are presented in various forms – including embossed paper, indian ink paintings, earrings and steel carvings. Her playful cynicism makes these works far more complex than they seem on the surface.
It’s exciting to see work that is of such high quality, and that can simultaneously prompt reflection and conversation about the history of the place we live in.
FELLED, Turumeke Harrington, and KINGDOMS, Reuben Paterson, at Page Galleries until May 18.