In print: George Watson on Robyn Kahukiwa

“Robyn Kahukiwa’s mahi toi is direct and bold, her paintings simultaneously embrace the warmth and richness of Te Ao Māori, of our values, spirituality, and practices whilst also depicting the fraught social realities for many Māori living in colonised Aotearoa,” writes George Watson in Issue 00.

Robyn Kahukiwa, The Choice, 1974, oil on board, 97 x 126 cm. Collection of Pātaka Art + Museum. Courtesy of the artist

Robyn Kahukiwa’s mahi toi is direct and bold, her paintings simultaneously embrace the warmth and richness of Te Ao Māori, of our values, spirituality, and practices whilst also depicting the fraught social realities for many Māori living in colonised Aotearoa. This Māori realism, imbued with the indigenous science of storytelling, holds tight to our sovereignty and our right to depict ourselves, our people and our struggles.

For Kahukiwa, “Our identity will be a different one than it was, unless we ever get our land back.”[1] The complexities of cultural identity, of what it means to be Māori in the wake of this loss of land is explored in her work. In typical tangata whenua fashion, Kahukiwa weaves the past, present and future together, fusing the ancient within the new. She depicts contemporary Māori as a diverse group of people, bound together by whakapapa––some have bleached blonde plaits adorned with huia feathers, others, flowing patupaiarehe-esque red hair. She paints figures giving birth, pēpē cradled in long dark hair and invaded landscapes full of Pākehā flags, private property signs, police, barricades and fences. Many of the figures Kahukiwa depicts wear traditional adornments with pride, testament to the resilience and agility of our cultural forms to time travel and re-formulate our identities within the present.

In one of my favourite works by Kahukiwa, The Choice (1974), a wharenui sits within the denatured environment of a black and white chequerboard floor, where a young girl is positioned in the foreground holding a pale mask to her face. The floor looks like a chessboard or the chequerboard floors depicted in 17th century Renaissance court paintings. Is the meeting house a pawn or queen within the imperialist Pākehā realm? Is the mask a skin of assimilation, or a theatrical device to play with?

Kahukiwa’s focus on central figures, often female atua or wāhine toa standing staunchly, springing from the kōkōwai earth, draws on a long tradition of the use of the figurative in Māori art, where tangata whenua are understood as expressions of the land, and of our ancestors. In this way Kahukiwa’s work does not necessarily need the western frameworks of fine art as commodity in order to function. Kahukiwa’s subjects, materials and concepts are Māori, they start with the unruly ground of Papatūānuku, and work from a specifically Māori ontology, in which our creation stories live on through us, and where “we act all the time influenced by Papatūānuku as part of her, rather than experience her (the ground/land/world) as a useful platform upon which we independently and heroically conceive and perceive the world.”[2]

Kahukiwa shows us how mahi toi can be a tool of self-definition for Māori, how our creative practices can carve spaces of sovereignty where proud expressions of Māoritanga can thrive.

[1] Robyn Kahukiwa, “Five Māori Painters: Robyn Kahukiwa [video interview],” Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2014. aucklandartgallery.com/page/five-maori-painters-robyn-kahukiwa (accessed 18 January 2021).

[2] Carl Mika, “The Uncertain Kaupapa of Kaupapa Māori,” in Te Kawehau Hoskins and Alison Jones, eds. Critical Conversations in Kaupapa Māori (Wellington: Huia Publishers, 2017).

This article appears in The Art Paper Issue 00. Purchase to read more.

Writer biography: Born in Turanganui (Ngāti Porou, Moriori and Ngāti Mutunga) George Watson graduated with a Masters in Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts in 2016. She recently returned to Tāmaki Makaurau after completing the Maumaus Independent Study Programme in Lisbon, Portugal. Recent work includes Eternal Girlhood of the Settler State, presented by May Fair Art Fair in collaboration with Tyson Campbell (2020), and Mānawa i te kāniwha, a mural in collaboration with Abigail Aroha Jensen at Artspace Aotearoa.

The Art Paper 00, TĀMAKI MAKAURAU

(limited edition brochure)

Issue 00 celebrates artists who live or exhibit within Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), Aotearoa (New Zealand). Produced in conjunction with the Auckland Art Fair 2021, published by Index.

Featured artists: Conor Clarke, Owen Connors, Millie Dow, Ayesha Green, Priscilla Rose Howe, Robert Jahnke, Claudia Jowitt, Robyn Kahukiwa, Yona Lee, Zina Swanson, Kalisolaite ‘Uhila.

Contributors: Dan Arps, Julia Craig, Erin Griffey, Susan te Kahurangi King, Shamima Lone, Victoria McAdam, Robyn Maree Pickens, Meg Porteous, Lachlan Taylor, George Watson, Victoria Wynne-Jones.

Specs: 56 pages, 23 x 26 cm (folded vertically)

$10.00

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