Te Puhi o te tai Haruru

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

Tony Fomison first visited Taranaki in 1960, his final year at art school in Christchurch, when he spent a week in the region studying the boulders carved by Taranaki Māori prior to European contact. Throughout his career, Fomison’s archaeological interests ran in tandem with his visual art-making, and Taranaki — its history, landscape and people — was a subject he returned to in both fields.

Te Puhi o te Tai Haruru depicts a sweep of Taranaki coastal landscape peopled by ancestral figures, one of whom wears the raukura (albatross feathers) associated with the passive resistance movement of Parihaka Pā and the Taranaki people. It is a magisterial late painting from a series concerned with the handing on of ancestral knowledge.

Centrally positioned, the small Puhi figure is flanked by the clouded landscape to the right and a monumental head on the left. The head presses up against the foreground of the composition like a watcher through a window: its scale recalls the monoprints of giant heads that Fomison made in the late 1950s while he was carrying out surveys of the rock art shelters of South Canterbury for the National Historic Places Trust. Above the central figure the composition is divided by a dramatic diagonal line, which isolates the guardian-head on a shadowy ground, while the smaller figure marks the point of transition between darkness and light. Imaged variously as a cave, a maze, a birth canal or the fall of light through a high window, this slashing diagonal device began to appear in Fomison’s work from the late 1970s and may be read as either a shelter or a trap.

Fomison’s work testifies to his vision of the landscape as an emblematic place, a guardian of secret histories handed on from person to person. Towards the end of his life he commented, ‘I became attracted to Te Maori because here was this culture produced in this country — an oral culture based on a love of the land, and a love of the old and young ones. In other words,
a past, present and future.’1

Lara Strongman

1 Tony Fomison, quoted in Anne Fenwick, ‘Put art first’, New Zealand Listener, 5 March 1990, p. 119.

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Drawing on his long-standing ambition to make mural-sized 'apocalyptic' paintings of history in New Zealand, and his 'sense of a burgeoning bi-culturalism', Tony Fomison began working on Te Puhi o te tai Haruru in 1984. This oil paint on hessian on board painting is the largest of a number of paintings he made about the 'handing-on' of ancestral knowledge.

Landscape and memories
In this painting Fomison comes as close as he ever would to depicting a particular place. It is set on the Taranaki shoreline: the Puhi figure refers to the daughter of the chief, the raukura feathers to the Taranaki people of Te Whiti o Rongomai. Fomison imagined the ancestors of this place, and sought to confront his audience with this tangible, powerful past.

Drawings on rock
Te Puhi o te tai Haruru is informed by Fomison's knowledge of the landscapes of the Māori rock drawing sites in Taranaki. He had earlier studied rock drawings in South Canterbury, and he was familiar with Theo Schoon's work on rock drawings for the Canterbury Museum. Fomison has made the point that his landscapes do not have any literal reference to the rock drawings, as a sign of respect for their cultural significance. In an article about Māori rock art in Taranaki he wrote that 'In pre-pakeha times at least, art was too sacred for casual use . . . none but a craftsman in the service of his ancestors was free to render the sacred spiral in a more permanent form.' Although Fomison does not literally replicate the markings, he imagines their makers and, as an artist, translates their cultural meanings in a fictional mode.

Te Papa owns twenty-seven works by Tony Fomison.