Nga Morehu

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Nga morehu — which translates as ‘the survivors’ — is an instructional narrative requiring the viewer to contemplate the legacy and ongoing effects of colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand. Shona Rapira Davies is no believer in the ‘improvements’ of post-colonialism — instead, she implicates the viewer in the mamae (pain) that three different generations of Māori women have undergone and must still endure. The sculptor uses the heavy figurative forms of eight standing women and three seated kuia (elderly women) to state unequivocally that the struggle of wāhine Māori, Māori women, continues. Like Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian and Marquesan sitters and the Māori and Pacific subjects in the work of Robyn Kahukiwa, these are powerful and powerfully built Polynesian women.

Nga morehu also owes emotional inspiration to Auguste Rodin’s bronze group The burghers of Calais, 1884–89, which involves a similarly bleak narrative from the Hundred Years’ War between England and France: six men offer to sacrifice their lives in return for King Edward III lifting the siege on their starving, war-torn city. While Rodin’s figures are battered, even skeletal, the physiognomy, gestures and figurative stance of the women in Nga morehu show they are a determined people who, while enduring mamae, will survive their ‘winter of colonisation’. Dressed mournfully in Victorian black, they openly bear deeper and even more difficult burdens, conveyed through the haunting detail of their wide-open mouths. The viewer can almost hear their tangi, their cry.

One of the strongest features of Nga morehu is its challenge. The main group of figures are life size, without pedestals and appear to be actively moving into the audience’s space. Within the artwork kai karanga — those callers, usually women, who usher visitors into a space and those from the guest side who respond — call out across an imaginary marae ātea (open space in front of a meeting house). But the more we think about this exchange the more we realise that they are instead calling out, past the girl, or kōtiro, who looks on, across the gallery to you, the viewer. Indeed, it is the viewer, and thus wider New Zealand society itself, that is being challenged with the searing issues that Rapira Davies raises.

Rangihīroa Panoho

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Created in 1988, Nga Morehu is a sculpture of life-sized female tipuna (ancestors) with one small female child. Striking and dignified, confrontational and intense, Nga Morehu pays tribute to the strength, resilience, and beauty of Māori women.

Karanga and waiata
The women in Nga Morehu are performing the karanga on an unfinished whāriki (woven flax mat). The karanga is a ritual call of welcome undertaken on ceremonial occasions by Māori women steeped in language, knowledge, and genealogy. Text covers the bodies of the figures. A waiata (song) that links Ngāti Hine with Te Arawa is painted on the kaikaranga (the woman calling the karanga). A poem by Christine Lydon cloaks the naked female child and speaks of the future. Derogatory statements scar other figures, expressing the hostile attitudes directed at and carried by Māori women.

Exhibiting the scars of the past
Nga Morehu was originally exhibited in Whakamamae, a two-woman show by Rapira Davies and Robyn Kahukiwa at the Wellington City Art Gallery in 1988. The work provides an acute social commentary on the effects of the combined forces of colonialism and Christianity on Māori women. It deals with pain and grief, things hidden and lost, and the reclamation of value and worth.

Te Papa's holdings of works by Rapira Davies include a number of drawings showing the development of Nga Morehu.