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essay series one: series two: series three: OTHER
kirikiriroa
ahi ka |
first there is a mountain... Pokai is the name of my marae but Pokai Whenua was the name of Te Kooti's horse - it means 'Travel the Land'. The horse image was taken in 1996. I was travelling over our family land on the East Coast, up into the back country. There the hills are just too steep and high to walk so I rode this wonderful flea bitten grey horse who was very quiet and steady. During that trip I took a photograph on the beach at Port Awanui where it looks as if the horse is seen against the sky but it's not. The horse is really seen against the sand. I've always liked this kind of visual shift which turns the viewer upside down. Later when I was reading about Maori prophets, I found out that Te Kooti had a white horse called 'Pokai Whenua' who had supernatural power. Te Kooti was inspired by the scripture in Revelations which said that the rider of a white horse was the one who would be 'Faithful and True'. grandad The picture of my Grandfather was taken standing in the driveway of his house in Wairoa on the day that my family presented a chalice to the Maori church at Nuhaka. My Grandfather was very keen to make a gift to this church in memoryof my Grandmother who had died in 1989. As a child I remember marching with Nana off down the road to Church. She'd be dressed in her Sunday best with her trusty handbag over her arm. In this picture Grandad is 91 years old. He seems a much more handsome version of a William Burroughs figure. On the day of the memorial service I arrived at the Church and to my amazement my Grandmother suddenly appeared. I first saw her from behind - she was wearing a floral dress and had a familiar stoop. I was confused and in that split second transported. But then I went into shock and promptly burst into tears when I knew that I must be mistaken.I had to ask Mum who she was. The figure belonged to my Grandmother's younger cousin and seeing her like that was overwhelming. Most of the service was in Maori, except for a small section in Pakeha for the benefit of the Hughes whanau, the majority of whom don't speak the reo. Then when the Communion was over we had a lovely cup of tea with allthe relations. But when my family began to sing a waiata most of us forgot the words. There was this embarrassed shuffle and tentative mumble which only very gradually got more confident. It was only Grandad's singing and prodigious memory that saved the day. When I think about occasions such as this it seems that my Pakeha-Maori family has got a foot in one door and a foot in the other. Suddenly there is this slippage as a chasm opens up beneath you because neither tradition sustains you. I have placed Grandad's image alongside the horse because he has encouraged me and my interest in our land. Grandfather has retained this abiding faith in the land and has kept its meaning alive for us as a family. mountains My fascination with the mountain as a form probably goes back to my childhood. I grew up in the Bay of Plenty in Kawerau. In our house my bedroom looked out onto Putauaki or Mt Edgecumbe and so everyday I would wake up to see this beautiful elegantly shaped volcanic mountain framed by my window. I also remember long trips peering out the window squashed between my brothers in the back seat of the family car. Because I didn't get carsick I had to sit on the right hand side of the car, my older brother on the left -in case of emergency stopping when he needed to puke and my youngest brother got stuck in between us both. This experience is one of the starting points for the mountain image which appears in the pair of photographs called 'Artery'. The first of these photographs was taken on the road near Ruatoria. Although it looks like a mountain it's actually a pile of gravel but if you get up close and look at it again you will see tucked into the bottom left hand corner, right on the horizon, the distant silhouette of Hikurangi, the real mountain. When I was photographing roadside gravel piles I'd talked to some kaumatua from Whangara. They said that when the road up the Coast was being made Te Ana a Paikea - the island formed by the tail of Paikea's - was cutoff and used for shingle. The story goes that all the machinery used to quarry the rock to make the road kept breaking down so no more ofthe island was taken. The second of the photographs in the 'Artery' series was taken out the car window on a journey from Kawerau to Ruatoria. Mum had come with me on this trip and we were cruising along in my clapped out Subaru, with me photographing out the window not looking at the viewfinder, when just past Te Kaha we went around a corner and there it was. Bang. By this stage Mum had taken over the driving because when we started the journey I was trying to navigate, drive and take photographs as well. Naturally enough this made Mum a little nervous so she intervened and put herself behind the wheel. Mum also thought that I was mad attempting to use my camera without ever looking through the lens. signs When I began 'travelling the land', I had been mostly interested in recording the journey process rather thanlooking at the content of the journey itself. But this changed when I decided to make a shift into colour. Suddenly I found myself very attracted to these unassuming roadsigns which I hadn't noticed before that constantly kept popping up in the landscape. I was lucky enough to grab the second of the '55' road sign in the last of the dying light. I remember that it was just before dusk and the colour of the sky above the ocean was extraordinary. paint My paintings are really quite recent. They're based on the gravel piles. I was starting to play with the look of underexposed photographs in which all that is visible is this very faint outline. In the beginning I thought the way I'd 'paint' them was to print the image straight on to canvasusing a photographic process. But I didn't like the quality that I was coming up with so I transposed these processing experiments from paper to canvas. In addition to this I have always liked Ralph Hotere's black on black and the quiet subtlety of them. All the paintings in this series have the identical title 'Maunga' although each one has its own individual map co-ordinate. This encourages the viewer to find out for themselves whether there is a 'mountain', at that location or not. I quite enjoyed this trickery for a while but now I'm interested in the more intuitive ways that we respond to and identify ourselves with our landscape. For me the mountain operates on this instinctual level. It seems that when most people see this shapethey want to know where it is and they want to identify the place. The first time I showed my paintings to a friend they said, 'Now don't tell me, I know where that is'. And all the time it was one of my roadside gravel piles. But they insisted that it was a real place. In this sense I think that although we 'see' these images and believe we recognise them in fact we don't. The ambiguity of these works is such that even if you are entirely familiar with the mountain shape, this memory might not be sufficient. As an artist I am able to deceive you because sometimes the 'look' of the mountain no longer represents the mountain it is. luminosity In the photograph 'State Highway 2', the roadside shed in the first image was glowing as the afternoon sun hit it directly. Although the mountain was important to me I began to look at the way in which everyday man-made structures could themselves be seen as symbolic markers in our landscape. So, the glittering face of an ordinary corrugated iron shed sitting on the side of the road is visually similar to a mountain and wharenui where layers of meaning can flow between them all. The shining road sign was taken at Ratana Pa. Although you can't read it because I've blown out the text with direct flash, the sign points you down Tai Rawhiti St. The irony is that I was on the West Coast of the North Island photographing a signpostsaying 'Tai Rawhiti' which refers to the Coast on the completely opposite side of the island. The flash, which has obscured the words Tai Rawhiti -pathway of the sun, in this image, ironically acts like the sun itself so that this luminous phrase glows even after dark. cartography Signposts also contain important remnants of history. The names of the roads that saturate our landscape refer to some personor some event and like the highways are interconnected. So I started to look at the 19th century Maori leaders recorded in thisroadside history. I asked myself what kind of memory or place do we give to these individuals who had such a profound impact on our political and social map at a time when Maori people were struggling to retain land and assert our sovereignty. One of the things that fascinates me about roadsigns is that they can and do stand for memorials to real people,as their place in history has been legitimised by the process of mapping land. The joke is that the honour of having a road named after you is often accorded by the very people who imprisoned, or harassed or hunted you down. I find it interesting that so much of our history is recorded in this type of cultural topography. To start with, I photographed roadsigns in whatever light was available. This use of the incidental light often revealedthe post holding up the sign which fixed the image in a given landscape. On one trip I ended up photographing roadsigns afterdark and amused myself with the visually frustrating effect of having signs floating across black fields without an intelligible connection to any place. This experimentation led me on to the 'Prophets' series which I photographed entirely at night using flash toreplicate the reflective glow of the text you might see caught in the beam of the car headlights on a dark country road. I then deliberately erased all sense of the landscape while at the same time retaining the importance of place by including in the titles the actual co-ordinates of the locations as they appear on the map. prophets In the 'Prophets' series the first sign I shot was Te Kooti Rd. Te Kooti Rd is at Wainui, very close to Ohiwa Harbour inthe Bay of Plenty. Te Kooti died at a place near here. When I photographed the Te Kooti Rd sign I went out with a friend and we drove around and around while I took photographs outthe passenger seat window. She had her son and her niece in the back seat of the car. They were 5 and 6 years old and they kept asking us 'Why are we doing this? What are you taking pictures of?'.I was thinking 'Look kids, I need to get lots of photos because I can't tell if I am in focus or not'. I tried to shut them up by saying 'We'll just have to keep driving in circles until we finish the film'. The little girl sitting in the back seat thought about this for a moment and then replied, 'We're not driving in circles, we're driving in oblongs',and of course she was absolutely right. Maybe she'd only just learnt the meaning of the word but considering the situation it was very astute of herto apply it. Later when I went to remove the film from the camera I noticed that it didn't seem to need rewinding. I couldn't remember whether I'd run the film off or not so I didn't worry too much and went off to shoot some more roadsigns. By this stage the first of the film I had used was processed but then the lab told me that on the Te Kooti roll none of the film had turned out. I said `No no no, that can't be true'. So I rescued the film from the bin and sure enough right at the beginning of the roll there is this one frame with all 36 exposures on it. Although my camera had broken down it still managed to provide me with this single perplexing and delicious image full of echo and resonance. At the time I didn't know what to think. On one hand I was excited and on the other just a little bit spooked. I kept wondering whether I meant to photograph Te Kooti's sign, or not. After all Te Kooti was known to be a trickster. He was never one to be pinned down and this image of Te Kooti's sign has this disappearing quality. Neither was his sign ever going to be one that could be read exactly like those of the other prophets. Well now I see it as a test. If you decided that you could see in this image the gift for what it was, then you'd be allowed to keep it. And if you couldn't, well it was your fault for not looking in the first place. The three other photographs in this series contain some visual plays as well. The Kenana image looks like a flag, the Ratana like a cross and Te Whiti St with its broken pole forms the shape of an axe. tracks To me my images of maunga and signposts and flags talk about what I see as the interface between my two cultures. There is no neat seam where Pakeha and Maori meet. As each comes up against the other there is a space that opens up between them. I'm not sure where this space is exactly, only that it exists. I think that my work might be like some of the roadsigns in our landscape. Whether or not the signs I make represent an actual way forward is another matter. Although my work really doesn't try to offer answers it does indicate possible directions. All I hope to record on this journey are my personal observations and process of inner questioning. But, as I travel the land the tracks I make are my own.
First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is. Donovan. From 'There is a Mountain'. Greatest Hits,1972. |
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