Gina Matchitt (born 1966), Te Arawa, Whakatohea

Gina Matchitt is one of a number of Māori jewellers who have been developing jewellery that draws on contemporary New Zealand styles to express Māori customary concepts. These artists also include Areta Wilkinson and Richard Bell.

Matchitt was born in Rotorua and grew up there. In 1994, she graduated from UNITEC in Auckland with a Diploma of Design in Jewellery.  In her final year at UNITEC, she created a series of seven brooches called ‘Safe Houses’. They combined architectural, woven, and carved forms to represent locations and buildings from her past, and to communicate ideas about belonging.

Matchitt held her first solo show, Ngā Whiriwhiri, in 1996 at Fingers Contemporary Jewellery Gallery in Auckland. She has also exhibited in many group shows.

In 1999, she won a Seppelt Contemporary Art Award for her Merchandise portfolio of work. She was one of nine winners that year, chosen from more than 250 artists. The award allowed her to exhibit Merchandise at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.

Merchandise is about external influences on Māori culture: the arrival of missionaries; the commercialisation of religion; the introduction of alcohol and tobacco; and the power exerted by multinational companies and globalisation.

In Merchandise, Matchitt reworks global symbols, including both religious symbols and the brand logos of several multinational companies. Of the logos she has said,  ‘I’d like to see rangatahi (young people) giving their mana to their own symbols such as the koru, the tiki, or the hei matau. I want them to question what’s behind these American symbols and see them as examples of ongoing colonisation.’ (1)

The items of jewellery in Merchandise can be seen as talismans designed to counteract harmful external influences. The works are a modern form of a Māori custom known as whakanoa, in which rites are used to free people, things, or places from danger or restriction. Taking oppressive symbols and remodelling them so that they can serve new, empowering purposes can be one form of whakanoa.

Matchitt has divided the Merchandise portfolio into three groups:

Wairua (the spirit) is the first group, and it deals with religion. Here Matchitt comments on the way the early missionaries suppressed Māori rituals and art practices, and expected Māori to adopt European clothing, and ways of life. She combines Christian images, such as the Cross and the Madonna, with the logos of multinational companies. In doing so, she draws parallels between religion and commercialism.

Mauri (the life force) is the second group. These pieces of jewellery are about the negative influence of addictive substances, such as alcohol and tobacco on Māori wellbeing. Matchitt sets fragments of the packaging from cigarettes and alcoholic drinks into silver crucifixes, highlighting the role that whalers, sealers and traders, and later settlers played in introducing Māori to these substances.

In the third group, Tinana (the body), Matchitt presents her view of globalisation as another form of imperialism. She protests against this threat by taking the emblems of global sportswear and fast food companies and showing them in new ways. For example, she makes a Nike tick from the prized local material pāua, and turns it into a pendant that hangs so that it resembles a customary fishhook.

Dr Deidre Brown writes in the Merchandise exhibition catalogue: ‘By using whakanoa to exorcise the assimilationist aspects of commercial religion, drug addiction, and global enterprise, Matchitt is suggesting that we need to cleanse and repair our wairua (spirits), mauri (life force) and tinana (bodies) in order to progress.’

Matchitt now works in Switzerland, where she lives with her husband.

References

1. ‘The Mana of Symbols’. (1998). In On arts: news from Creative NZ, No 11

2. Merchandise Jewellery by Gina Matchitt, exhibition catalogue (1998/1999). Created with the support of Creative NZ, Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa

Text originally published in Tai Awatea, Te Papa's onfloor multimedia database (1998).