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In the 1970s the artist Richard Killeen began several series of works inspired by his study of visual patterns found in Pacific art. Killeen denies any specifically Pacific meaning in his work — ‘any meaning that the design has is not the reason for using it, i.e. Polynesian art. The meaning and the design is irrelevant. The reason is that it exists.’1 However, the formal qualities of this painting and its title nonetheless demonstrate an engagement with Pacific art forms.
According to Nina Tonga, Te Papa’s Curator Pacific Art, the repeating triangular motif used in this painting is known as ‘manulua’, a design that is commonly found in tapa (bark cloth) from Tonga, Sāmoa and Fiji (where it is called ‘kamiki’). Manulua means ‘two birds’, and the design is indeed an abstraction of two birds flying together such that their wings appear as interlocked triangles.2 The Pacific association wasn’t lost on viewers in the late 1970s, either. Writing about Killeen’s works in 1978, critic Neil Rowe described them as being ‘firmly rooted in Polynesian art’. He further remarked that any of the works ‘could happily serve as a surrogate New Zealand flag or as an emblem for any newly emerged Pacific nation’.3
You cannot write about a Pākehā artist’s use of or reference to Pacific patterns without acknowledging the problematic nature of cross-cultural appropriation and the heightened awareness in New Zealand since the late 1980s of intellectual property rights over cultural material. This was confirmed when art historian Francis Pound described Killeen’s motifs as ‘borrowed forms’, which ‘inescapably carry with them into the space of their new usage some connotatory trace of their place of origin’.4
Sarah Farrar
1 Richard Killeen, quoted in Francis Pound, Stories we tell ourselves: The paintings of Richard Killeen, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Auckland, 1999, p. 14.
2 Ping-Ann Addo, ‘We pieced together cloth, we pieced together culture: Reflections on Tongan women’s textile-making in Oakland’, Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings, Paper 469, 2004, http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf/469 (accessed 9 March 2017).
3 Neil Rowe, ‘Wellington’, Art New Zealand, no. 11, Spring 1978, p. 61.
4 Pound, Stories we tell ourselves, p. 14.