Living Traditions of Ngatu and Moko

Monday, 2 November 2015, 11:36 am
Article: Howard Davis

Living Traditions of Ngatu and Moko: Robin White and Marti Friedlander

Two stunning displays of indigenous art by Dame Robin White and Marti Friedlander are masterfully juxtaposed at Masterton's Aratoi Wairarapa Museum of Art and History. White's enormous Nagatu (painted tapa) were first unveiled at Auckland's Two Rooms and Porirua's Pataka Art & Museum earlier this year. The initial configuration has been adapted and enlarged to fill the main gallery at Aratoi, while Friedlander's twenty-nine monochrome photographs Kuia Mau Moko are a touring exhibition from Te Papa. Taken together, the strength and subtlety of both exhibits amplify and complement each other beautifully.

Born in 1946, White is of Maori and Pakeha descent. After studying under Colin McCahon at the Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland, she produced a series of works depicting provincial life - fish and chip shops, flat-bed trucks, and isolated figures in landscapes. In 1982, her family moved to Tarawa, a small coral strand in Kiribati, where she collaborated with the Baha'i community for seventeen years, fashioning works based on traditional weaving processes and woodcut prints. After her atoll studio burned down, she continued to explore traditional tapa techniques in both Fiji and Tonga, revivifying an indigenous craft and enthusing a younger generation of women with a passion for the properties of naturally-occurring pigments.

It took several years of work with Tongan artist Ruha Fifta and the women of Haveluloto to complete Ko e Hala Hangatonu: The Straight Path - four large-scale fabrics constructed from barkcloth, earth pigments, plant dyes, and tutu. Their technical skill is overwhelming, involving a lengthy process of fabrication, transfer printing, and hand-painting that was an intensely spiritual experience for those who participated. As ethnographic evidence, they document a process of art production that is both communal and collaborative, suffused with a deep sense of Polynesian spirituality. The result is a fascinating hybrid of historical and contemporary iconography, patterns, and references that range from Europe, across the Middle East, to the Pacific.

Ko e Hala Hangatonu: The Straight Path, Courtesy of Aratoi Wairarapa Museum of Art and History

The result is reminiscent of pre-aniline Navajo blankets - richly chthonic and ferruginous fusions of raw sienna, ochre, and burnt umber whose intricate skill and monumental scale is breath-taking. Dame White described the installation as "making work that, while acknowledging and honouring tradition, explores new themes, and introduces new and fresh images and symbols. I have a keen interest in the visual nature and aesthetic function of pattern and how it can integrate with images to represent principles, convey ideas and carry a narrative - a key aspect of the Tongan tapa tradition. The idea is to see 'development' as a continuum … the patterns and images which convey the idea of the path are assembled within the tradition Tongan tapa framework of a vertical and horizontal grid, but we have departed from a completely traditional design to encode new visual material and new ideas.

"There is a traditional and often-repeated Tongan pattern called the Hala Paini - the pathway of pines. It represents the path fringed with Norfolk pines that leads from the King's Palace in Tongatapu to the royal tombs. I have taken the idea of a pathway and recast it as the Hala Hangatonu - the straight path ... or course of action that takes you directly to where you need to be.

Ko e Hala Hangatonu: The Straight Path, Courtesy of Aratoi Wairarapa Museum of Art and History

"As with Hala Paini, the Hala Hangatonu also has a literal anchorage, namely Ben Gurion Avenue in Haifa, Israel, and the steps and terraces the Baha'i gardens and shrines on the slopes of Mt. Carmel. These form a continuum that precedes from the Mediterranean shore to the crest of Mt. Carmel. Distinctive features from these two geographic locations are included in the tapa design [which] combine with traditional Tongan patterns, alongside details of early European art that influenced my work - Duccio's Maesta and Hans Memling's The Man of Sorrow in the Arms of the Virgin."

Acknowledged as one of New Zealand's leading photographers, Marti Friedlander is perhaps best known from her collaboration with historian Michael King. His 1972 publication 'Moko: Maori Tattooing in the Twentieth-Century' documented the lives and experiences of the last generation of kuia to receive the unbroken tradition of moko kauae in the 1920s. For Maori, tattooing can symbolize a rite of passage, loved ones who have died, or a way of telling someone who you are. The veteran warrior Netana Whakaari of Waimana commented - "You may be robbed of all your most prized possessions, but your moko cannot be deprived, except by death. It will be your ornament and your companion until your last day."

Born in London's East End to Russian Jewish immigrants and raised in orphanages from the age of three, Friedlander appropriated and transformed a detestable symbol of anti-semitism into an enduring tribute to the human spirit. The weather-beaten faces of the women depicted in her exquisite silver gelatin prints display an extraordinary range of emotions - from dignity and humor, through strength and sadness, to a sense of bleak despair. It was assumed that once they died, moko would vanish forever. Te Papa's Senior Maori curator, Rhonda Paku, described how "The photographs tell a story of resilience, loss and sorrow for a way of life that was fast slipping away … none of them realized that within two decades moko kauae would begin a quiet revival, eventually seeing hundreds of Maori women proudly bearing the moko of their ancestors and reconnecting the past with the future once again."

Paku explained this idea of a shared autochthonous identity to her own daughters: "Receiving moko kauae is your legacy and your birthright, and a call for you to aspire to your higher self as a Maori woman. The physical experience is different for everyone. But universally it is an initiation that the bearer must endure to pass from innocence to maturity, from the dark to the light, to reach the tipuna and atua through the shared experience of the ancestors."

Both exhibits share an exuberant awareness of this spiritual cathexis - the transmission of a living legacy along matrilineal lines as a defining and defiant act of preservation and self-creation. They remain on display at Aratoi until November 15.

© Scoop Media

Howard Davis

Scoop Arts Editor

Educated at Cambridge and UCLA; worked on several major Hollywood feature films and as a Kundalini Yoga instructor in Los Angeles; currently enjoying life in Wellington.

Contact Howard Davis

• Email - howard@scoop.co.nz