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Overview
This brooch made of beef bone was carved by Jason Hall in 2004, and is one of a series of twenty brooches collected together under the title Home. This particular brooch is a representation of a standard, unshaped fence paling. Hall emphasises the relationship between his brooch and the wooden original by using the grain of the bone to evoke the qualities of timber. The brooch is an example of the way in which the nail or bolt holes in a picket fence can seem like eyes, giving a sense that the fence is watching. Unlike Home (3), which is the same form, this brooch reproduces the bent nails of the original - a flaw of craftsmanship that gives the suggestion of slanted eyes. This tendency towards anthropomorphism links Hall's brooches to poupou (upright carvings of ancestors), which run along the walls in whare whakairo (carved meeting houses), and it is common to all the brooches in Home. While each brooch in Home is designed to be worn, the series is intended to be viewed as a group, massed along the gallery wall. When collected together in this way, Home declares its origins in the study of picket fences, and also makes reference to the palisades of Māori pā (stockaded villages).
Skeletons in the closet
Home was first exhibited in an exhibition called Jason Hall: Ornaments for the Pākehā (Caucasian New Zealanders) held at Pataka, Porirua, in 2004. In the catalogue, Damian Skinner argued that Home is powerful because it 'reveals the central tension of being Pākehā: our cultural forms don't come from here, just as the white picket fence of colonial villas sits apart from the land it divides'. A sign with foreign origins is, through the material of bone, transformed into an object that speaks of final connections to the land through the Pākehā dead that lie buried in New Zealand soil. As Skinner writes, 'transformed into bone [these brooches] speak of a connection, a claim to home that exists in the midst of identity complexity. We need to honour the dead, and these brooches speak of both how hard this is to do in contemporary Aotearoa, and how necessary the struggle is if we are to remember our ancestors and where we come from.'
Bicultural jewellery
Hall's recent jewellery is concerned with questions of Pākehā identity. While his work explores the history of contemporary jewellery in New Zealand - the bone is as much a reference to the 1988 exhibition Bone Stone Shell, which celebrated the use of natural materials in New Zealand contemporary jewellery - it also tackles larger cultural issues. One way in, perhaps, is to note the ways in which the works make use of visual similarities between different cultural forms. In other works, Hall has made much of the chance relationship between Māori kōwhaiwhai (scroll painting on rafters of meeting houses) patterns and wrought iron gates. In Home, he pursues a more subtle set of links between picket fences and palisades, and the nail holes of wooden pickets and the eyes of Māori carving. In this sense Hall's jewellery could be described as bicultural - a sign of the historical interaction between Māori and Pākehā, and an argument for understanding how central this relationship is for Pākehā.