Te Wepu

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

Te Wepu is a seven-by-two-metre assemblage in seven sections created at the Ōtatara Arts Centre at the Hawke’s Bay Polytechnic. It was then installed at the National Art Gallery, Wellington, and blessed by Ringatū leader Monita Delamere on 6 August 1986. Te Wepu is primarily made from demolition materials gathered by Para Matchitt’s Ōtatara students at building sites in nearby Napier — an act of recycling that is culturally, symbolically and historically significant for the work.

In form and title, Matchitt’s work makes reference to Te Wepu (meaning ‘the whip’), a late nineteenth-century Māori battle flag. The ensign has a complex provenance: it was sewn by Catholic nuns for a Māori rangatira (chief), commandeered by the separatist Māori leader Te Kooti Arikirangi, decommissioned by a Pākehā military commander and later deposited in the Dominion Museum, where it was mistreated and reputedly destroyed. Matchitt resurrects the flag’s five key symbols in a contemporary form, emblazoning them in welded and angle-ground steel figures in the work’s first section. There they are reinvested with new meanings. The word ‘huakina’, also the name of the series to which the work belongs, means to ‘raise up or elevate’ and that is precisely what Matchitt is doing when he flies his gravity-defying wooden version of Te Kooti’s battle ensign.

The deeper struggle that Matchitt highlights is contextual. This wall assemblage and the four other wooden constructions comprising ‘Huakina’ were installed upstairs at the National Art Gallery while just downstairs the blockbuster Te Maori exhibition was on display in the National Museum. In Matchitt’s view the museum exhibition’s aesthetic and selection of objects had a conservative ‘classicism’, a bias long promoted by museum ethnologists and central government. This required Matchitt’s wero, or challenge. In Te Wepu, he deliberately chose for inspiration an icon of Māori separatism which came from the National Museum’s own collection. Te Wepu draws on Western modernism’s contrapuntal tradition of critiquing legacy and attacking the orthodoxy that Te Maori promoted. In this way, Matchitt’s wooden assemblage reflects the ideological and aesthetic struggle that contemporary Māori artists can experience with institutions when the latter endorse only one particular type of Māori art.

Rangihīroa Panoho