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Mata Aho in front of ‘AKA’ (2019). Copolymer fibre marine rope, steel. Exhibited in Àbadakone | Continuous Fire | Feu Continuel, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo courtesy of National Gallery of Canada
Mata Aho in front of ‘AKA’ (2019). Copolymer fibre marine rope, steel. Exhibited in Àbadakone | Continuous Fire | Feu Continuel, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo courtesy of National Gallery of Canada

ArtJune 20, 2020

Wave, whip, rise, roar: The art of Mata Aho Collective

Mata Aho in front of ‘AKA’ (2019). Copolymer fibre marine rope, steel. Exhibited in Àbadakone | Continuous Fire | Feu Continuel, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo courtesy of National Gallery of Canada
Mata Aho in front of ‘AKA’ (2019). Copolymer fibre marine rope, steel. Exhibited in Àbadakone | Continuous Fire | Feu Continuel, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo courtesy of National Gallery of Canada

A collective of four wāhine Māori artists, Mata Aho Collective transforms human-scale Māori weaving practices into atua-scale contemporary artworks that recently earned them a nomination for the 2020 Walters Art Prize. For writer Cassandra Barnett, their work provides some much-needed solace during a painful time.

Today, I am a grieving and angry mother. As I write it is the eighth day of protests against the killing of George Floyd by US police. I have spent the morning reading the testimonies of Black mothers grieving for their murdered sons. I am not a Black mother but I have a Black son. The atmosphere is what it is and cannot be siloed off from my other mahi – an essay on the wāhine Māori art collective Mata Aho. Thankfully, as I zigzag between their website and the racism of the world, the universe hands me something I need. A Mata Aho work called ‘Mahuika’, exhibited at the Honolulu Biennale in 2019. 

‘Mahuika’ (2019). Barrier mesh, wool and cable ties. Exhibited in 2019 Honolulu Biennial, Hawai’I State Art Museum.

The work is named for the Māori godmother of fire, and in it Mahuika’s ten flaming fingernails reach out of ten archway windows on the second floor of the classical, white-and-cream Hawai’i State Art Museum. These sharp-pointed red-and-gold fingernails are enormous, reaching from the second storey windows nearly down to the ground. I imagine Mahuika – who like Pele the Hawaiian fire goddess is connected with volcanoes – really is this size. Even larger in her full raging glory. Like lava she flows out windows. Like a grandmother, she exceeds whatever you think you know about her.

Installing ‘Mahuika’ (2019). Barrier mesh, wool and cable ties, exhibited in the 2019 Honolulu Biennial, Hawai’i State Art Museum.

The flaming fingernails are not realistic. They’re shaped like vertical pennants. They call upon a whakapapa of Māori self-determination that goes back to Te Kooti’s pennant ‘Te Wēpu’, and beyond. They’re the colour of fire and of the US-occupied Kingdom of Hawai’i’s insignia. They wave, with kuīni glam, at the State Capitol and the Iolani Palace grounds. We’re here, they wave. Just you try and hold us back. Mahuika is the strength I need today. 

I turn now to ‘Aka’, the huge aqua woven 14-metre-high glowing pillar that has earned Mata Aho a nomination for the 2020 Walters Prize – about-time acknowledgment of the achievements of this collective comprising Erena Baker, Sarah Hudson, Bridget Reweti and Terri Te Tau. This soaring, majestic work showed at major international indigenous art exhibition Àbadakone | Continuous Fire (2019), where it reached for the ceiling of the National Gallery of Canada in Vancouver. It is expected to be installed in Auckland in May 2021 for the Walters Prize exhibition. 

‘AKA’ (2019). Copolymer fibre marine rope, steel. Exhibited in Àbadakone | Continuous Fire | Feu Continuel, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Collection: National Gallery of Canada

‘Aka’ is inspired by Whaitiri, the female atua of thunder, a knowledge keeper and guardian of the aka, or vine. In many iwi tellings, Whaitiri taught Tāwhaki to climb the aka matua to the twelfth heaven, Te toi o ngā rangi, where he retrieved the three baskets of knowledge for our Māori people. Mata Aho’s enormous cylindrical aka was handwoven of marine rope using whatu, a finger weaving technique. The work magnifies the whakapapa threads linking us back to our atua, via both DNA and material knowledges passed down hand to hand. ‘Aka’ also celebrates the place of wāhine at the centre of mātauranga Māori and its ongoing preservation. The iridescent column rises, teleporting us between earth and sky. More than anything I want to step inside the blue-green vine and bathe in its soothing light. It feels safe there, warm in the embrace of an unbroken line of potent, knowing, weaving wāhine. 

All Mata Aho’s artworks are grounded in their first 2012 installation, ‘Te Whare Pora’, named for the traditional house of weaving and women’s arts. As the artists explain on their website, “We understand Te Whare Pora to be a state of being as opposed to a physical location”. This early work was a vast softly gleaming black faux-mink blanket, painstakingly woven and sewn by the collective from many standard-sized minkies. 

‘Te Whare Pora’ (2012). Faux mink blankets. Exhibited at Enjoy Public Art Gallery. Collection: Victoria University of Wellington

‘Te Whare Pora’ invokes Hineteiwaiwa, the atua of weaving, female arts and childbirth. As a mother in midlife, I feel I am just beginning to grasp the full meaning of these connections: how mothering (whoever’s doing it) requires creative acts not only in conception, birth and child-rearing, but all through our children’s lives. How the greatest creativity of all is needed when mothering becomes entwined with fear and rage and grief. The world threatens our children; our ability to protect them (and ourselves) is repeatedly devastated; and through all the trauma we must dig deeper – and reach out to each other – inventing new ways to stay strong for them. This blanket acknowledges Te Kore. I feel it giving me permission to lie down wrapped up in the darkness and wait until I can move again.

For Mata Aho, ‘Te Whare Pora’ set an agenda they have slowly expanded but not strayed from, of working collectively to transform human-scale Māori weaving practices into atua-scale contemporary artworks. Works that hold fast to tikanga and mana wahine, but also articulate something in global institutional spaces. 

Making ‘Te Whare Pora’ (2012). Faux mink blankets. Exhibited at Enjoy Public Art Gallery. Collection: Victoria University of Wellington

I wonder what their work says to non-Māori audiences, many of whom will have little to no grasp of the significance of Mahuika, Whaitiri, Hineteiwaiwa or Te Whare Pora. I cast back, past this seasoned old me who feels, daily, the burn of decolonisation, racism and transcultural parenting in a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Back to the young, kūare, colonised kid who went to Europe and fell in love with contemporary art.

‘Kaokao #1’ (2018). Reflective fabric and cotton. Installed at Toi Pōneke, Wellington.

Young Europhile me never gave much thought to raranga. Weaving seemed enigmatic and femme, at a time when I was – tbh – pursuing a harder-edged intellectualism. I didn’t need ‘Te Whare Pora’, not yet. The patterns in Mata Aho’s work wouldn’t have opened themselves to me – the eponymous ‘Kaokao’ (a tukutuku pattern associated with birthing); the pātikitiki in ‘And Only Sea’ (another tukutuku pattern linked with women’s fishing and whāngai practices); the māwhitiwhiti in ‘Tauira’. Like gnostic texts these forms hold their secrets close, wrapped up in story. Waiting for those who need them. 

Installing ‘Kaokao #1’ (2018). Reflective fabric and cotton. Toi Pōneke, Wellington.

What happens when viewers feel something in an artwork they can’t grasp? Some turn away. Others lean in. It depends. Sensitive folk might hesitate, feeling both the balm and the wero in the work. I wonder if this accounts for the mainstream media silence around Mata Aho’s international successes. You can’t understand their work with your head alone; you need to feel its solace. And it needs to feel safe with you. I’ve grown and learned our stories, I’ve gotten to know my atua. But even now when encountering our mātauranga I hear a warning alongside the summons: Tread with care. Like a mother, I feel both vulnerable and protective.

‘Kiko Moana’ (2017). Polyethene tarpaulin and cotton thread. Installed at the Museum of Hessian History, Kassel, Germany 2017. Collection: Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington

The flickering of meaning is there in the synthetic materials too. ‘Aka’ is woven from industrial marine rope. ‘Mahuika’ is woven from barrier mesh. ‘Te Whare Pora’ is made of those minkies (mass-produced offshore, but a familiar, cosy sight on many a noho marae). Other works are made of reflective tape or, in the case of Mata Aho’s 2017 Documenta work ‘Kiko Moana’, plastic tarpaulins. Cheap, accessible materials – the kind you can get at The Warehouse. Their non-absorbent, repellent qualities add a bristle to the soft invitation of Mata Aho’s textiles. Some viewers might slow down, pondering environmental impacts. And in that pause… our people ride in, virtually, flooding those synthetic fibres. Our contemporary communities, to whom these materials are as homely as toothbrushes, familiar from labouring work on roads and in gardens, in forests, fisheries and other primary industries. 

I’m an urban Māori, academically-trained, raised mostly by my Pākehā whānau. But as a grownup I’ve been visiting my marae off and on for over a decade now (a bittersweet reconnection I’m unspeakably grateful for). When I do, these materials are everywhere: just-shucked-off high-viz vests hanging off plastic chairs, white gumboots at the back door, barrier mesh when buildings need work. Sometimes they spark sadness (a kaumatua we wish could retire; a reno that kept us from our whare tūpuna). But they are also part of my joy at getting there, just as flopping on the old leather lounge suite and faux-fur cushions is part of my happiness at going home to my mum’s. 

Installing ‘Kiko Moana’ (2017). Polyethene tarpaulin and cotton thread. Documenta 14, Kassel Germany. Collection: Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington

The materials of industry and labour colour – fluorescently – the papakainga life I still fantasise about. My cousins would rightly laugh at me, but rope and mesh and high-viz are there at the flax roots, and they’re here in my daydreams too. This shapeshifting magic of the material world is the stuff Mata Aho weave with. In their hands, industrial fibres loom large as a hinge – a vine – between cultural worlds. 

Mata Aho’s faithfulness to non-precious, working-class, universally legible materials opens their practice to many other localised, blue collar communities too, including other indigenous communities. It also opens their work in intriguing ways to global political discourses beyond the indigenous (environmentalist, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist). Their use of this stuff feels like a détournement, a graceful spanner in the works of capitalism and its art systems. 

‘Tauira’ (2018). Synthetic marine rope. Exhibited in Embodied Knowledge, The Dowse Art Museum, Wellington.

Even baby, Euro me would’ve grasped this. Grownup me hears the atua. See what we do with the stuff you brought us? We keep practising our culture. The table-turning is delicious. We do things you never dreamed of. Unstealable things. They’re very nice about it, Mata Aho and our atua. They aren’t here to whakaiti anyone – they’re all about raising mana. They sit in, occupying, exceeding, and letting be too. They return us to the source. Our cultural strength lies in our relationships, our practices – not what you think we should look like. No harakeke, no feathers here. Taonga are about how we treat things, and what those things do for us – not what they’re made of.

So when I see the immense woven cloaks and blankets and vines of Mata Aho taking up space in the world’s museums, I think they’re communing. Communing from the future with all our taonga, all our tūpuna who went abroad and sometimes got stranded there; cloaking them in renewed aroha. Communing too with the colonial museum habitats: Here is our ocean. You came for us – you took us, took our taonga, tūpuna, cousins. But our wairua, our wai, is limitless and will flow back into all your spaces. We have come for our people. And we bring you back your taonga – the materials you gave us. Here, accept your gift, returned, transformed and with mauri intact. 

Making ‘Stop, Collaborate and Listen’ (2014). Māori Art Market

Communing with those who still don’t get it, opening a charged, provocative, awakening space with a flourish of cloth that whips the air and changes the ions, turning every drop of O2 into a Tardis for trying again. And communing with oppressed peoples everywhere: Fight. If we can escape, exceed all confines – so can you. But stay tau. To fight well – to paraphrase Bruce Lee – you need to stay tau.

Mata Aho practicing ‘Woven Songs’ within Taloi Havini’s ‘Reclamation’, 2020. Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh. Photo: Contemporary HUM

That’s where ‘Woven Songs’ comes in a piece the collective took to Dhaka Art Summit earlier this year. Not an artwork, not a performance, but a necessary moment for their practice and an honest expression of what it takes to hold space as they do. In the photos and videos from Dhaka we see the four wāhine sitting in a close circle, facing each other, gallery/passersby/world zoned out. They are practising their new pātere, composed by Te Kahureremoa Taumata. They’re doing this for themselves. In the process, they weave their collective – and all of us – stronger. 

And today, Mata Aho’s art is communing with me. Offering me somewhere to sit when I’m broken. When thinking no longer works. When going home is too hard and flesh-and-blood whanaunga aren’t near. When trying to be tough will crack me. Giving me somewhere to sit safely when I can’t hold the world anymore – for my son or for me. Somewhere to sit in my mind, heart and puku, and draw down the atua I need. 

Installing ‘Tauira’ (2018). Synthetic marine rope. Exhibited in Embodied Knowledge, The Dowse Art Museum, Wellington.

Wherever there’s whakapapa Māori there’s mana wahine, waiting to rise. My ultimate solace in this grievous world is the feeling that my sisters, mothers, grandmothers and atua wāhine of all persuasions have my back – and I theirs. The whole world needs this. Today I’m thankful – from the seat of my liver – that Mata Aho are out there, holding a calm, enlightened space, calling me and all my sisters back to our power.

Keep going!
Jack Trolove. Image: Rebecca Swan
Jack Trolove. Image: Rebecca Swan

ArtJune 13, 2020

Along the mangroves: The in-between space of Jack Trolove’s paintings 

Jack Trolove. Image: Rebecca Swan
Jack Trolove. Image: Rebecca Swan

Tulia Thompson talks to Paparoa painter Jack Trolove and considers his new body of work, on show in Auckland from Sunday. 

After painting all day, Jack Trolove walks along the mangrove coastline. It is dusk, as the day is turning, dark gathering, the mangroves becoming more shadowy. The way places you love slip into your consciousness, like the phrases and gestures of a loved one. Likewise there is something of in-between states about Jack’s potent new paintings. 

Detail from ‘AerialRoots’, Jack Trolove, oil on linen, 2020 (Image: Rebecca Swan)

The dark eyes in a large oil on raw linen painting, ‘Aerial Roots’, are brimming with tears. The young man looks either triumphant, or destroyed. Which is it? This is what makes painter Jack Trolove’s portraits so compelling. There is the visual immediacy of the faces, often in close-up, simultaneously slipping back into abstract lines of thick, bold paint.

I meet Jack during level two. The required lack of hug feels a bit awkward but necessary, and the vegan cafe is otherwise empty of customers. He is wearing a dull black shirt with muted red roses. He has only just finished painting. He is still “close up in it”. I ask him what it has been like working during lockdown, and he explains he stopped painting. He thought his new exhibition Mangrove at Whitespace in Auckland would be cancelled, and got a shock when it wasn’t. 

“I just quit my life in an amazing way.” Instead, he grew vegetables. 

Jack lives in a hut in the bush in Paparoa, one and a half hours north of Auckland. “You have to walk through the bush to go to the loo.”

‘Dealing In the Long Roads’, Jack Trolove, oil on linen, 2020

Mangrove, a collection of 11 portraits, draws visual cues from the palate of Trolove’s surroundings, but the central concern of being liminal, between things, is an ongoing preoccupation and lived experience. Mangroves, those dark, waxy, horizon-dwellers that cleave to shoreline, are resolutely intertidal, they can tolerate being submerged in sea water.  

‘Aerial Roots’ is so called because of mangrove’s pheumatophones – the muddy sticks you see around mangroves that take oxygen to their roots. A breathing device.

Mangrove has also been propelled by technical and aesthetic curiosity; the thick impasto work Jack has done previously is still exciting to him, but it was a challenge “to work with mark marking”. Colour became “intuitive”. He wanted to create “shifting space”. 

Detail from ‘Bones’ oil on linen, Jack Trolove, 2020

The blue eyes in another painting, ‘Bones’, look tired. Maybe his subject is exhausted. Maybe her gentle face is just watching something distant, her mouth uncertain. There are dark greens and browns that harness the work to the earth. Jack feels this painting does what he dreamed for it. Some devastation, some hope. Sometimes when he walks past the studio he says she looks peaceful.

I’ve noticed the same faces popping up between collections. I’m wondering if the paintings are love letters. I ask him what it is like to paint people he is close to. Jack is pragmatic: they are often people around him a lot. 

One of the women he paints is a friend, a theatre-maker, a shapeshifter. He uses her form as “scaffolding” or “bones”, but takes the paintings to diverse places. 

The portrait is “not recognisable, it has to work to communicate something that is nothing to do with them, or me”.

Jack’s creative process, then, is “being right there with the paint”; to follow the feeling. “Get everything away that isn’t there.” The paintings are their own boss. Jack laughs. “Sometimes they just want to be really beautiful, be really pretty, and I try to ruin them on the way through – argh, it keeps you humble. Creativity leads what is happening.” 

Detail from ‘Moss’, Jack Trolove. Oil on linen, 2020

In ‘Moss’, the mid-green eyes bring to mind a character in a Mike Leigh film. Is she somebody’s worried mumsy, feeling muted,  but painful emotions, while pleading, or acquiescing? Or, is she broken or breaking open? Is she proud? Wide, thickly painted strokes of light green and orange make moss aesthetically present. I remember the phosphorescent moss I’ve seen on slim, even trees in woods in Vancouver; the way in half light, moss appears forward like a sign from the gods.

I ask Trolove about the eyes and repeated form of the uneven teeth. He says they are “a point of deep space on the body, a point of opening you can articulate”. They act as a portal.

Besides, “Teeth are gross and beautiful and weird.”

In ‘The Keener (Salt)’, messy, uneven brushstrokes of thick-black intermingle uncomfortably with pale pink, a sense of unravelling. It is almost uncomfortable to look at. I am conscious of bringing my own story. I ask Trolove if it’s about trauma. He is non-committal. For him there is trauma in the piece, but also hope because of its fluidity. It is more an exploration of form: “How to hold forming and un-forming simultaneously.”

But still, he is happy to “invite hideous spaces”.

Detail from ‘She’s a Cathedral’, Jack Trolove, oil on linen, 2020

Humans often have such a pressing need to name things, and categorise. Why is it that we are also mesmerised by human expressions that are unfathomable? Why does it walk a psychological tripwire into the sacred? I spent a frustrating evening trying to Google insight from art history, which made me deeply regret being someone who writes about art. We are drawn to faces that are enigmatic.

Maybe we are curious. Maybe we can project our own inner world, and feel seen. Our feelings are always complex. When did you ever not feel some relief, alongside your deep despair, or residual sadness creeping in alongside moments of love and joy. 

Jack tells me that mangroves germinate self-rhizomatic pods, which spend up to a year floating, until going to where they can survive. There is in these paintings something of how we survive. That is, getting by in heteronormative worlds, until you can burst or bloom or transform. It’s the magick of queer and trans survival. Not feeling seen or heard. Feeling hyper-visible or invisible, not able to be seen. Yet the liminality is broader than gender. It is inhabiting all those in-between places, understanding the transitions between life and death.

Jack came from a large, Irish Catholic family: “Mum was pregnant every two years until I was 14.” He lived with his nana and great-aunty in the old folks home they ran. There was always death and new life.  

In the studio with new work 2020 (Photo: Rebecca Swan)

Mangrove tells stories of ebb and flow, resisting the settling place, finding the places in between. It is embodied, and abstract; passionate and sorrowful. “I keep expecting to be an abstract painter,” Jacks says, “but it just never happens, it is always back to the body.”

Trolove’s paintings seem fit for the strange, clambering and fretful world we live in. I am reminded of black lesbian poet Audre Lorde’s poem ‘Littany for Survival’. “So it is better to speak/ Remembering/ we were never meant to survive.”

Mangrove, Jack Trolove, Whitespace Gallery, Auckland, June 15 to July 10, 2020