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Overview
This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).
Born and raised in north Rūātoki in the Bay of Plenty, Arnold Manaaki Wilson was acutely aware of, and at times struggled with, the emphasis placed on Western art during his time at art school in Auckland in the early 1950s. However, he balanced out this bias on holiday breaks between university terms, when he worked with uncles — Ngāti Tarāwhai carvers with the Rotorua School — on meeting-house projects in his rohe (region).
The young sculptor/trainee carver made it his lifelong ambition to use his Tūhoe background to revitalise an antipodean understanding of Western art. Part of this reinvigoration concerns the importance of Tāne (god of the forests) in both Māori cosmology and Tūhoe culture, based as it is in the heavily forested
Te Urewera. Wilson found inspirational parallels in modernist Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși’s art. Brâncuși similarly drew on the folk woodworking and cosmological traditions of his people: his belief that objects had an essence and an inner, hidden reality also shares common aspects with the Māori concepts of wairua (spirit) and mauri (life force) found in the Haumia installation.
These poles depict the hidden identity of one of Tāne’s children. It is said that Papatūānuku (the land or mother-earth figure) placed Haumia Tiketike (god of wild, uncultivated things) under the soil for protection against Tāwhirimātea (god of the winds), because he was angered by Tāne’s role in separating their primal parents. Haumia is particularly associated with aruhe (fernroot), an everday but vital part of the ancestral diet, particularly during periods of food shortage.
These three figurative poles with their cylindrical surfaces, divided into cut, tapered, ringed and pierced sections, and lively, patterned painting closely relate to other non-Western traditions. The painted funerary totems of the Tiwi people in the Bathurst and Melville Islands of northern Australia also employ this aesthetic. As the Tiwi do, Wilson saw poles as marking off and setting aside special spaces. He also admired the different poles, or pou, of Māori woodcarving tradition: the erection of funerary poles outdoors to commemorate leaders; pou tapu, warning visitors about set-aside areas; and palisade pou, issuing a wero (challenge) to outsiders regarding the issues and rules of the mana whenua, or local people.
Rangihīroa Panoho