Gate

This brooch is sterling silver coated with white house paint. It was made by Jason Hall in 2004, and it belongs to a series called The Gate Between, first produced in 2002. Like all the brooches in The Gate Between - of which there are 12 different designs - this brooch is a found pattern. Hall selected the designs from 1950s and 1960s wrought-iron reproductions of Victorian gates found in suburbs around New Zealand.

Talking about appropriation
In 'Unhinged: Jewellery by Jason Hall' in Art New Zealand 118, Damian Skinner writes that 'The conceptual kick of Hall's work emerges from the visual relationship between the gate patterns he references in his brooches, and kowhaiwhai - the curvilinear patterns that decorate heke, rafters, in whare whakairo, decorated meeting houses.'

The title The Gate Between is a reference to Francis Pound's book The Space Between: Pakeha Use of Maori Motifs in Modernist New Zealand Art (1994), and the debate about cultural appropriation which has centred on the work of Gordon Walters. As Skinner writes, 'Hall's brooches are nothing like Walters's geometric bar and circle motif, but they comment directly on a debate that is often interpreted as an argument about who can (and can't) use Maori motifs.' Hall's brooches, and his title, draw a witty parallel between gates and the charge of cultural appropriation, both of which enforce boundaries and close off access.

Being bicultural
The Gate Between tackles the question of appropriation in order to address a larger cultural debate. As Fear Brampton writes in The Gate Between: Jason Hall, a catalogue published in 2002, 'Jason Hall's work is unusual in the context of contemporary jewellery in New Zealand in that … it has focused on issues of Biculturalism in relation to [Hall's] own identity as a Pakeha whilst wrestling with the associated historical issues such a designation references in relation to Maori.'

Hall's brooches are an expression of biculturalism that attempt to show how Pākehā identity is inevitably shaped by a relationship to Māori - even the name Pākehā is a Māori word. Yet Hall avoids using Māori culture as part of the way he creates these signs of Pākehā identity. His patterns look like Māori art, but they are actually from Europe. This effect of 'same but different' is how Hall evokes the Pākehā relationship to Māori. The brooches capture a cultural dynamic that is very hard to represent successfully.