He Whare Ātaahua - Jade Townsend in conversation with Melanie Tangaere Baldwin.

INTERVIEW, ISSUE °201, PARTNERSHIP 26 MARCH 2024
BY JADE TOWNSEND, MELANIE TANGAERE BALDWIN

He Whare Ātaahua at Hastings Art Gallery is JADE TOWNSEND’s first site-specific installation and her first exhibition in Heretaunga Hastings, in Ngāti Kahungunu territory. Strings of shells are painted onto the gallery’s walls, encircling framed works and coiling around the trusses of the vaulted ceiling. Nearby, at Te Aute College, similar forms decorate the ceiling of the wharekai, painted there in the 1980s by a group of students led by Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Porou artist John Hovell (1937–2014).

In conversation with MELANIE TANGAERE BALDWIN, Townsend speaks to the influence of Hovell’s paintings and his writings on kōwhaiwhai, which have held special significance for the artist as she worked toward this exhibition in the land of her iwi, thinking about whānau, whakapapa and cultural hybridity.

 

MELANIE TANGAERE BALDWIN
When I saw your show, it was only me in the gallery. I felt like I needed it to be quiet in order to hear it, to sit down in silence and be overcome. Then I was like, Where else do I feel this? What are the spaces that I’m being taken to? And I was thinking about church, about Māori versions of church, and wharenui, the memorial aspect of wharenui, where the photos are on the wall and you’re being transported. I was also thinking about it in a Pākehā context, and being in a stranger’s parlour, someone else’s space, where the people who are being immortalised are for them to remember, and not for me. It made me reflect on how the English approach adorning space with things that fill the room, whereas Māori versions of adornment within whare make space for people and cloak them.

You describe John Hovell and Oscar Wilde as influences, and the work feels like such a Victorian English–Māori collision. It’s a really cool way to understand how I was feeling about it.

JADE TOWNSEND
I was drawing on a lot of the references you’ve made, especially religious or spiritual ones. I find those spaces overwhelming and impressive. I enjoy the sense of the foreboding drama when you’re waiting for something to happen—for the show or service to start. And, as you have expressed, too, those spaces can feel awkward, othering—like you’re waiting for permission or direction. For me, in those moments, it’s the silence that is loud.

Initially, I was trying to remember the names of my father’s siblings, who all live in Heretaunga, and I started to think about rosary beads and how they are a useful, practical form of adornment for the purpose of recital. So I created these big chains of shells in the space, each one representing an aunty or an uncle, a grandparent, or my mother, and they were circling other family members, whose names were written on the wall in chalk. The invisible labour in the work—me, for ten days, alone in the gallery, getting to rehearse the names of family members, those who live in that region and those far away—was a way to bring together all these different strands of whakapapa into one space.

I often think about whakapapa as an ‘always’. It’s always there, and so you leave it wherever you’ve been. The mauri of that space is changed; there’s a feeling of you being in the room, reciting your whakapapa.

From what I’ve been told, Hovell was a really spiritual man, and his practice was, similarly, a form of remembering.

Hovell created hybrid forms that represent Māori, the Solomon Islands and the wider Pacific, and he had a way of reconnecting things that aren’t always thought of as being close, in theory or in nature. While doing this installation I was kind of imagining Hovell as my teacher. I asked myself, How would he guide me through this project? There’s a lovely bit in his notes where he talks about the music he’d play for his students while they were painting, Bob Marley and Mozart, and how he’d make sure there was Milo and bananas and toast. I love imagining that environment and how fertile it was for expression. He confesses at one stage to returning at night to secretly repaint the students’ work if it wasn’t to the level required for the kaupapa. As a perfectionist, I relate to this conundrum!

I love how both of us, when we were looking at the wharekai, thought, There’s no way he didn’t finish their jobs for them, because it’s perfect. There’s a bit in The Passing World, taken from his notes, where he’s talking about the painted ruawhetu, the rafters, as being the light part of the whare, where you can have fun.[01] Almost all of his works are in homes or wharekai, places of love and sharing. Which is how people say he was, too.

When you were talking about rosary, and how you were making the connections to whakapapa and how it was an intensive making process, I was thinking that my experience of it was like a totally different thing. How much does that matter to you?

That’s a cool pātai, because I think, in the short term, I want the audience to feel all the juicy, lovely stuff—invited, accepted, included; and the wonderment of looking at a space that is this Māori environment, or alternative Māori environment, and succumbing to it. But I think the larger and bigger themes of my practice might only be accessible if you follow it long term.

I’m at the beginning of my career and there are many cycles of refining and expanding to go. I hope there is an audience who would like to be part of that evolution. Some of the themes in the show, such as cultural hybridity; translation or translation’s failures; creating territories for freedom and sovereignty; mythological landscapes that merge with real life, that merge with memory, that merge with inner desires and dreams … If you know that sort of stuff about my practice, then maybe you would bring that awareness, but I think, maybe like a taiaha, it has different faces. One that is for the general public, and one that’s more personal for me and my whānau.

I think heaps of toi Māori is like that. You give half-truths. You answer questions with as much as the person who’s asking not necessarily deserves, but can handle. We’re kind of brought up to not give everything away. To some people, you give it all. I was thinking about this, because when I looked at the writing on the wall—what the gallery’s telling me the show’s about—there was this massive gap between the gallery’s version of events and what we’ve talked about.

The show almost feels like a massive, inappropriately long pepeha or something. But, in all seriousness, it is a culmination of all these personal stories and scenes of whānau separating, and the atua and tūpuna that are in my consciousness all the time, and the wawata of my tamariki.

My practice explores my Māoritanga and tūrangawaewae as imagined psychological spaces that I carry around with me, interpreted or re-imagined as paintings. He Whare Ātaahua is this breakthrough moment for me, because it brings together that fantasy space with physically being on my tūrangawaewae. My idea of ‘home’ meets with the reality of it. I think back to some of my favourite disruptive spiritual moments, such as being in my nana’s room, just sitting on the edge of her bed and playing with her jewellery—that’s a boundaryless territory for me, where everything, between the physical and spiritual and multicultural, is all mixed together. Another one is probably giving birth, passing through the veil. And also when Elisapeta Heta invited me to her moko kauae ceremony. Each of these experiences unlocked new chambers of self-awareness.

I don’t know, and I don’t know if you can know, whether that’s a very common Māori-specific experience, where the space between life and death, or between worlds, disappears. Because I know so many Māori who can interact with that—not even on a buzzy level, it’s just a normal thing. When it happens, it’s always exactly when it was supposed to, and calm sets in and all of the things happen that make you realise that it’s totally alright to be doing what you’re doing and to be who you are.

So much of it is cosmic, a big dreaming space. My father had one of the most important interactions of his entire life in a very fleeting encounter in Heretaunga while he was painting, doing sign writing on the main avenue. He met his birth sister on the street for the first time, randomly. That one fleeting encounter led to all of these connections to this place and many more siblings—who I have painted on the gallery walls. I live for those chance moments, and that’s the beauty of showing within galleries, too, because you never know what work you might meet, or who else you might meet within that gallery space. Art is a way of falling in love with each other. And a few of my dad’s whānau came to the opening and have been spending time with the show, so now I have, through this artwork, started a conversation with my whānau that couldn’t have happened without the Trojan horse of art.

Does the impermanence of the work hurt a little bit?

It would feel like too much of me in a place to be permanent. It would feel too much like a shrine.

The more that I learn about the exhibition history of our wāhine Māori artists in this country, you know, the more I wish I could go back in time and see their shows. But I think that’s also a really important part, the not knowing, and making up for yourself what their exhibitions might have felt like.

I think that it’s also a big part of living in Aotearoa and looking at art. We also have very little access to heaps of the non-Aotearoa artists that we are influenced by. I spent heaps of time wishing that I could see things in real life or experience them, but then imagination comes into it.

We’ve talked a lot about John Hovell, because that’s a practice that’s common to us, but the work also references the American artist Alex Katz, for the lightness of touch that makes his paintings feel whimsical; Dexter Dalwood, a British painter, for his combinations of patterns and speeds that pull your eyes apart; and Chris Ofili, the first Black British artist to win the Turner Prize, who incorporates pop-culture references as a core part of his identity. I’ve been lucky enough to see some of their work in person, but I also love learning through books.

Reimagining a Māori British identity through art has required an approach and freedom akin to the Black British contemporary art movement, which promotes imagining or fantasising about your cultural identity as a legitimate way of being that identity. It’s a state of mind. And I really relate to that. I grew up in England from the age of thirteen. There weren’t any Māori around me, so I created a beautiful Māori world for myself, because I wanted to come home so badly.

One of the things I’ve always loved about John Hovell is that he is a different type of Māori artist. When you see him, you feel seen as well.

That feels like the politics of my practice, too, to show a perspective, one of a multiplicity of ways we exist as Māori. I want to make environments that conjure up an alternative or maybe a lesser-known Māori experience, one that has come to terms with itself as being made up of Māori whakapapa and British heritage. It’s something that can be beautiful and disorientating, but it’s constantly in flux and has these continual tensions that will evolve over time, and there are massive gaps of not knowing, but those spaces are full of potential. When we visited Te Aute College and lay looking up at the painted ceiling, I thought about Oscar Wilde and his lecture ‘The Beautiful House’. I was connecting to it as a British person. I’m convinced John Hovell wanted to create an environment where the beauty of his painted adornments was overwhelming, and the stories of people and place were there for everyone to experience, if you were prepared to succumb to them. Hence why the title of my exhibition is He Whare Ātaahua.

The exhibition is essentially a mural, and I’m curious—what, ideally, would you want to make in that kind of space, if you could do it again?

I’m scared to say, but my ultimate dream would be painting something at home that is permanent, something that my hapū and iwi feel connected to. That is a lifelong dream, it would be a lovely thing to happen one day. And every painting and show I make is a little step towards that ultimate goal.

I think it’s realistic. It’s also the type of goal that is important to tell people. Especially because, when it comes to who puts themselves forward for those ‘of your land’ projects, or statements of place in a Māori context, they’re often very confident, but it also starts to describe who Māori are in a very precise way. It’s terrifying to say that you want to take part in it, too.

I hope that you feel this work speaks to Māori, because it does. You speak to whakapapa, so any Māori in the room is going to try and understand whakapapa through your painting. When I am with the work, I ask, What does whakapapa feel like to her?

 

[01] “It has been characteristic to place small comic interludes in the house patterns in certain places of intimacy (like having a wart under the armpit) … I suppose that is because we sit back or lie resting close to them around the perimeter of the house, and these curious details afford some light relief when the going is heavy.” John Hovell quoted in Damien Skinner and John Hovell, The Passing World, The Passage of Life: John Hovell and the Art of Kōwhaiwhai (Auckland: Rim Books, 2010), 22. 

Jade Townsend, He Whare Ātaahua, 9 December 2023–14 April 2024, Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga Hastings Art Gallery Heretaunga, Hastings

In partnership with Hastings City Art Gallery.