Hiria Anderson, Te Ao Hurihuri – At the end of the Beginning

Hiria Anderson

Te Ao Hurihuri – At the end of the Beginning 

Tim Melville
4 Winchester St
Grey Lynn
Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland)
Aotearoa (New Zealand)

2–23 December 2020

Hiria Anderson, Kōrero tuku iho, 2020

Hiria Anderson (Rereahu, Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Apakura) was raised in her grandparents’ home in Te Rohe Pōtae King Country and today lives in her whānau homestead in Ōtorohanga. Her practice is focussed upon painting the everyday lives of the people in her community; environments that reveal the nuanced connections between Māori culture and 21st century life.

Writing in the Summer 2020 issue of Art Collector Lucinda Bennett suggests that “in depicting the everyday lives of her community, [Anderson’s] paintings interrogate the history of representation of Māori in European art, gently shifting the viewpoint from outside looking in, to inside, looking out.”

Anderson graduated with a Masters in Fine Art with First Class Honours from Whitecliffe College of Art and Design in 2016. 

— Tim Melville (gallery text

Phrased by our ancestors, Te Ao Hurihuri literally means “everchanging world.” But the term goes deeper in its reference to Māori cosmology and whakapapa, as well as to the modernity that, for better or worse, has impacted Te Ao Māori in these times of COVID.

The exhibition subtitle, At the end of the Beginning, is a line from Winston Churchill. Addressing his nation at a pivotal moment, three years before the end of World War II, Churchill said: “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps…the end of the beginning.” Just as World War Two defined Churchill’s generation, COVID-19 is our pivotal moment in global history. Even bearing in mind the fading of collective memory it will define us until the last person to experience these times is dead. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 faded from collective consciousness also...until now.  

I zoom in to my own little world and I try to describe in paint what I see happening around me.

My paintings are impressions of pre- and post-lockdown life. They are quiet moments in time, but they arrive on the back of life-altering moments where people are forced into change and there is no turning back.

The only way is forward.   

Life on earth sometimes depends on a forceful or catastrophic act of regeneration to begin again.

Te Ao Hurihuri.

— Hiria Anderson (exhibition statement)