Kei hea te komako e ko

These twenty individually shaped pounamu, or greenstone, rings, with red paint detailing, form a single work called Kei hea te komako e ko? (‘Where will the bellbird sing?’). The name is drawn from a well-known whakataukī, a Māori proverb that expresses cultural values about the significance of people. ‘What is the most important thing in the world?’ the whakataukī asks, and answers in its final line: ‘It is people, it is people, it is people.’

In this proverb the flax plant and the bellbird are both used as metaphors for people. Jeweller Neke Moa employs the whakataukī in several ways. She uses it to underline the relationship of jewellery to the body — and therefore to people. It locates her practice as connected to this land and place, and to the indigenous culture from which her work extends. And it emphasises that her jewellery is Māori jewellery, linking her work tangentially to the whakapapa (history and genealogy) of both body adornment and pounamu.

Neke Moa is of Ngāti Kahungunu and Ngāi Tahu descent. Ngāi Tahu are the cultural owners of pounamu, and so it is hardly surprising that Moa is drawn to the material, which she describes as ‘culturally charged’. 1 Found on the West Coast of the South Island, pounamu is a prestigious stone within Māori culture. It was customarily employed for creating toki (adzes), mere (hand weapons), tiki (human forms) and matau (the fishhook of Māui), used both practically and ceremonially. It was also used to create items for adornment and inter-tribally as an exalted trade item.

In form these rings are based on pōria kākā, bird-tethering rings, which were placed around the legs of domesticated birds — usually native parrots — which were then used to entice and capture other birds. Pōria kākā were also highly valued taonga, heirlooms worn as neck and ear pendants and passed down the generations. The red paint used here is a substitute for red sealing wax and the earlier kokowai, or red ochre, used to render important objects sacred.

Megan Tamati-Quennell

1 Adrienne Dalton, ‘Neke Moa: Mahi-a-ringa’, Art Jewelry Forum, 26 October 2016, https://artjewelryforum.org/neke-moa-mahi-a-ringa (accessed 8 January 2018).