Sacrifice: From the series Guarden gates

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

Vivian Lynn is a significant figure in the history of feminist art in New Zealand. Throughout her career she has used a range of media — drawing, painting, printmaking, collage, assemblage and installation — and reworked various forms, symbols and materials to expose the ways in which they have served dominant forces in society. Her aim has been to recode these forms and materials so that they might convey different meanings, enabling rather than disabling women.

Perhaps her most distinctive medium is human hair, which she began using in 1982. In both Western and non-Western cultures, hair is feared as the substance that, by growing from roots within the body, most obviously transgresses the boundaries between interior and exterior. Women’s hair carries particularly dangerous connotations. In her use of it, Lynn reclaims its power as an emblem of female sexuality, exploiting its connections to the body and the brain, and finding correspondences with their functions as thresholds (demarcating inner self from outer world) and containers (where the mind is held).

Sacrifice, one of seven ‘G(u)arden gates’, is a detail from one of Lynn’s most significant artistic statements. The full installation was first presented at Janne Land Gallery, Wellington, in 1982. The seven hurricane-mesh gates, each woven in various patterns with hair, and sometimes other substances such as clay, were arranged in a specific order, with their titles suggesting a journey. This was both a literal and spiritual passage from birth to death, or from a state of unknowing and subservience to full consciousness and equality-in-difference. Lynn describes the installation as an alternative to the Stations of the Cross, with the focus on female experience rather than male sacrifice. Her work therefore unfolds as a circular rather than linear journey, forming a safe precinct that is both connected to the real world and separated from it.

Lynn hoped that her ‘G(u)arden gates’ would be installed permanently in an environmental structure or shelter so that visitors could enter a darkened and contained space, like a chapel or a cave, with circular seating around a pool of water illuminated by an aperture or lantern above. While this never eventuated, their first showing at Te Papa in 1993 saw them installed in a temporary octagonal room with a seat at the centre where viewers could ponder the work and its gradual material shifts.

Christina Barton

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Sacrifice is one part of Vivian Lynn's seven-part artwork called Guarden Gates. Lynn's use of diverse materials such as real and artificial hair and galvanised steel gates gives this work its symbolic and visual power. The contrast between these materials echoes the conceptual contrast at the heart of Guarden Gates - the garden, the threshold represented by a gate or guardian, and the journey. Lynn uses these issues in her artistic search for a myth that counters existing ideas of women, and better explains women's place in contemporary society.

Mythology and contemporary art
While working on Guarden Gates, Lynn became interested in the Sumerian story of Inanna, queen of heaven and earth, who descended into the underworld. Using hair, which is a substance both female and dangerous, Sacrifice transforms the seven stages of Inanna's descent into a feminist metaphor, where organic masses of hair - variously woven, wrapped, embedded, and plaited - contrast against their opposite, the steel gate.

Feminist materials
The ideas of Guarden Gates had already featured in Lynn's work. Sacrifice reveals a specific instance of the artist's interest in exploring how feminine identity is created through visual art and the wider culture. Hair has historically been used as a memento of loss, of the body, of sexuality. To cut a woman's hair has been, at different times, a way to denigrate her. Hair is a kind of threshold between different cultural states. Similarly, the garden is a site of transition between nature and culture, domestic and public. Sacrifice activates all these contradictory meanings to explore the position of women in society and culture.

Suffrage and celebration
Te Papa purchased Sacrifice in 1982, and the remaining six parts of Guarden Gates in 1993 when they were exhibited in a purpose-built room to commemorate Suffrage Year, the centenary of women in New Zealand winning the vote. The exhibition was part of a wider effort to celebrate the work of women artists often omitted from traditional art discourse.