David Eggleton
Whenua edited by Chloe Cull, Ken Hall, Felicity Milburn, Melanie Oliver and Peter Vangioni (Te Puna o Waiwhetū Christchurch Art Gallery, 2025), 391pp, $71
Whenua—that single word embossed on the cover—looms as a weighty and portentous slab of a book. In te ao Māori, ‘whenua’ means both land and placenta, with the whenua personified in creation stories in the form of the wahine atua Papatūānuku, as the introduction tells us, suggesting this anthology’s approach will be one of solemnity and veneration, with artworks functioning as a form of eyewitness testimony, as if ‘whenua’ might stand for a monstrous midden wherein lurk real live taniwha.
The book is a blockbuster, the size of a boulder, like something you might stub your toe against. Intended as a manifesto as much as a tour guide, it’s based on the exhibition He Kapuka Oneone – Handful of Soil, which is ongoing on the upper floor at Te Puna o Waiwhetū Christchurch Art Gallery, and which in turn derives from the rich resources of the gallery’s own permanent collection. Thus this tome showcases canonical art that has been deliberately shuffled, reshuffled and juxtaposed to set up a contestation of landscape narratives, while also affirming a new institutional order, one that acknowledges mana whenua and takata whenua—the te reo spellings respecting the Kāi Tahu dialect of the first peoples of Te Waipounamu.
With the book’s kaupapa on a seismic mission to collapse old hierarchies that glorified the British Imperial project and to raise up a Māoricentric worldview, the layout itself is divided into eight sections using headings named from whakataukī—Māori proverbs and traditional sayings—that might be compass points for navigation through time and space, from ‘Me he mauka teitei: To a lofty mountain’, to ‘Kai raro i te kāuru: Understories of the forest’, to ‘Ka whawhai tonu mātou!: We will fight on!’ Dozens of contributors, toggling between concepts of ‘settling’ and ‘unsettling’, the ‘homely’ and the ‘unhomely’, ‘dispossession’ and ‘repossession’, ‘destruction’ and ‘renewal’, write as kaitiaki and conservators, or else as innovators and disruptors. Sometimes the assembly line of essays—for there are many of them—reads as if the commentators are trying to dazzle the reader with curatorial boilerplate as they collage or lump together individual artworks in search of a telling mosaic, a unified gestalt. Suppressing certain thematic aspects of period-era pieces while highlighting others, these polemicists end up not with a brawl of images exactly, but with an eclectic assemblage of imagery that does not conform neatly to a rote procession of fables and fabulism as declarations of identity, trauma and therapy. Rather, they maintain their qualities as buoyant artefacts, deriving from assorted art-historical traditions.
The book somewhat didactically claims that ‘traditional modes of representing whenua’ have been abandoned in favour of kaitiakitanga (guardianship) and whakapapa (ancestral connection). In fact, the book’s approach of braiding disparate artworks together in the name of the land serves to emphasise the power of curation to reframe, reposition and repurpose the secular or quotidian artwork, and give it sacerdotal status within a compendium resembling the decorated altar of a church.
From early on, syncretic Māori iconography turned Pākehā colonial artefacts and Pākehā colonial symbols, including Christianity, to new purposes, finding affinities in shapes, textures and materials. One might see, then, in subsequent Māori artist representations of anthropomorphised or transmogrified landscapes, various amalgamations or blendings or hybridisations that acknowledge non-Māori spiritual beliefs and concepts as part of a holistic world-order, where what is uniquely Māori is in dialogue or kōrero with other ways of looking.
Beyond this, representations of landscape are always representations of power and mana, as Jacinta Ruru argues in her essay, ‘A cloaked landscape: Legal devices in Mount Aspiring Park’, where the author points out that a legalised process of obscuring, concealing and erasing created ‘a monocultural identity’ for our national parks: ‘from the 1970s “wild” lands began to be interpreted as “pristine” landscapes’. Here, land serves as both spectacle and propaganda to advance nation-building. However, beginning in the 1980s, a revisionist series of Acts of Parliament gradually established official recognition of ‘mana Māori’ and ‘mana whenua’ within our treasured national parks.
In her essay, ‘Re-wilding: New thoughts on old landscapes’, Rebecca Rice explains that one of the purposes of Whenua is to add mātauranga Māori (traditional knowledge) to the captions on colonial depictions of landscape, so as to indicate ancient Māori travel routes, food-gathering locations and places of long-term occupation. Place names, she reminds us, are layered: at once a palimpsest and a genealogical table. When you erase names for a place, what else are you erasing? Claims to territory, for one.
Although Whenua is a book centred on the landscapes of Te Waipounamu, it ultimately acknowledges all the motu as emblematic of a living land, where natural features have personhood. Inevitably there are holes, gaps, omissions: townscapes are absent, and depictions of recreational landscapes and similar kinds of land use are negligible. There are also tensions between individual artistic representations of the whenua and the values and claims of hapū and iwi. Corporate appropriation of Māori mythology, and landscapes gobbled up for industrial-scale development, go largely unaddressed. Jenny Sew Hoy Agnew and Trevor Agnew, writing as outside contributors in their brief essay on the significance of Chinese gold miners in Ōtakou Otago during the gold fever scrambles of the nineteenth century, point out that artists too were intent on ‘ways of exploiting the landscape for profit’.
The book also functions as a record of a colonial economic zone that in the twenty-first century has become environmentally problematic, especially with increasing government deregulation, where the reality is not the idealised Arcadian landscapes of corporate advertorial but compromised locales under the pump of ‘dirty dairying’, or subject to the anxieties of climate change. For the Kāi Tahu iwi, devoted to responsible stewardship, the whenua is, as Hana O’Regan tells us, ‘tūrakawaewae’: a place to stand.
The opening pages of Whenua offer enveloping close-ups and magnified details of a medley of artworks that are shown in full later on in the sections where they are discussed. They range from the green translucent leafiness of Louise Henderson’s oil painting Thorn Bush (1972) to the spangly metal leaves of Kawakawa Job 12:7-8 (2022), a stainless steel sculpture by Shona Rapira Davies, and their magnification suggests the idea of immersion, of giving us a sense of contact with the realm of Papatūānuku, as the old colonial telescope falters, blurs, goes out of focus. But as something of a scrambled hotchpotch of what the book’s back-cover blurb calls a survey of ‘historical and contemporary artworks by more than 100 of the country’s top artists’, Whenua functions best when it offers individual images as carefully chosen talismans or touchstones of particular themes or topics accompanied by short explanatory texts.
The first complete artwork we encounter is the oil painting on unstretched canvas Whanau: Born (1979), by Robyn Kahukiwa, where a mother holds her newborn baby with the umbilical cord leading into the earth, as if to demonstrate the saying, whenua tākaekae: land of my umbilical cord. This is land as mother and mother as land; flesh and blood equated with mother earth. The tapu earth might also be a baptismal font or baby’s cradle, implying the replacement of the metaphors of Christian theology with the metaphors of Māoritanga. The painting is pantheistic, not monotheistic, with the earth itself embodying mauri ora, the life-force, and asserting family and connection.
If Robyn Kahukiwa delves into subterranean myth, Buck Nin, in The Road to Paihia from Kawakawa (1968), paints the wairua of the land as glowing, interlocking patterns that are taken from the whakairo (carvings) of waka taua (war canoes). Meanwhile, in John Bevan Ford’s pen-and-ink drawing Spöring’s View of Motuaro from the Endeavour, 1969 (1992), it’s as if a great cloud suspended over the ocean has been transformed into a kākahu or patterned flax cloak hovering in mid-air. The design of the garment, with its attendant diamond shapes, makes it a mantle, a symbolic and theatrical form of protection for the whenua and its people.
In the nineteenth century, Pākehā artists in Te Waipounamu were topographical explorers, painting and sketching in the foothills or clambering around the mountains of Kā Tiritiri-o-te-moana the Southern Alps. These artists in the field were often watercolourists, such as William Fox, who travelled light and pictured mountain scenery as a kind of subliminal threshold, shimmering with mystery. The photographer Edward Sealy managed to get his cumbersome glass-plate camera up to the head of ‘the Great Tasman Glacier’ in 1869, revealing a chunk of it in its vertiginous and icy glory in an albumen print. By contrast, video artist Janine Randerson in 2017 records the Waiho glacier in full retreat, dwindling and gushing meltwater under the impact of global warming.
Scrutinising mountains, an aggregation of colonial artists render alpine vistas and bushlands as both ethereal and forbidding, empty of human inhabitants. And whether swirling with mists or lit by the sun’s rays, the high country, too, is portrayed as a landscape fraught with ambiguities: seductive but also menacing. A subsequent generation of artists loosely termed the Waitaha Canterbury regionalists ‘embraced’, as curator Peter Vangioni explains, ‘a modernist approach’ to the land, creating panoramic aerial views of mountains, hills and plains as if swooping down on them. These were artists with a head for heights. Colin McCahon depicts Canterbury pasture lands as orderly quiltwork, as if in a glider, while Doris Lusk’s bird’s-eye views sail down inland valleys and along coastal harbours. Bill Sutton’s immense mural-like canvases command ochre landscapes, tamed and bisected by wheatfields and forestry plantations, as if viewed from a top-dressing plane.
But thus harnessed, landscape comes at a cost, with totemic dead tree stumps everywhere, as indigenous forest is ripped out, or set on fire, and exotics planted. Though images by Janet Peters, Russell Clark and Toss Woollaston extol farm labour and earth’s bounty, a gelatin silver print by photographer John Johns depicts the Devastation of Burnt Forest Hillside, Westland in the 1970s.
If much of the information in this book feels recycled from previous art histories and anthologies, there are nevertheless some startling and innovative sections, in particular ‘Kai raro i te kāuru: Understories of the forest’ and ‘Toitū te whenua: The land endures’, with their ecologically focused responses to landscape viewed through Māori perspectives. Curator Felicity Milburn holds a kōrero with Maire Kipa of the Kahukura Rongoā Māori Trust, which is involved with regenerating waterways near Ōtautahi Christchurch that have been damaged by agricultural practices. Maire Kipa describes this healing mahi as incorporating ‘the mauri of whenua, moana and kahere’, the energies of land, sea and forest. Invoking such energies establishes a connection with Indigenous peoples internationally, as well as with the turn towards environmentalism in contemporary art.
In her essay, ‘Rimu kind of rhythm’, artist and conservator Madison Kelly writes about the Te Korowai o Mihiwaka Orokonui Ecosanctuary, north of Ōtepoti Dunedin, where ‘different habitats shift and vibrate against each other … The edges between pre-colonial and colonised whenua are blurred by a constant unbiased passage of manu, insects and light. To walk in the forest here means walking through many histories and futures simultaneously.’ But while Kelly eloquently extols the positivity of regeneration, photographer Natalie Robertson trains her camera lens on land slumps at scale, caused by the regular arrival of powerful cyclones onshore. Her recent photographs taken on the East Coast of Te Ika-a-Māui show the power of rain to move and dissolve a range of hills, as floods wash away and reshape vast tracts of cleared land.
Tramping deep into remnant rainforests back in the 1990s, artist Denise Copland returned with dark etchings of foliage and tree trunks that are all canted angles and exuberant shadowplay. More quizzical, and more ambivalent, about the power of the primeval, a contemporary generation of Māori artists—Shannon Te Ao, Louise Pōtiki Bryant, Conor Clarke—has turned towards the shamanic, towards ritual and performance. Te Ao’s colour digital print Pūaotanga o Te Ao (2022), with its vaporous, wraith-like quality, invokes some oracular, trance-like state, as if seeking to summon up otherworldly spirits. It has a relationship of sorts with works by Ross Hemera and Bill Hammond that seem to be reaching back in time to summon up the wairua of Māori rock shelter art—and making an ancient birdland, seen as underworld lair or stronghold, still relevant.
A number of artists included in the book make of ‘whenua’ a kind of essentialism: a way of communing with the land by wringing out its saps and essences to produce art. As Su Ballard puts it: ‘I realised I wanted to work collaboratively and that the planet is one of our collaborators.’ Artist Cora-Allan explains: ‘being Māori I whakapapa to Aotearoa, to this land, and when I use whenua [earth pigments] it’s like connecting to my tūrangawaewae.’ She crushes the whenua down and sifts it ‘to get out roots, rocks, bugs and so on’, before churning it into a paste. Māori clay artist Tracy Keith says of his wood-fired ceramic vessels that he wants them to ‘look as if they were pulled from the earth’. Māori filmmaker Nova Paul establishes organic connection to whenua by shooting 16mm film that is then hand-processed in film developer ‘made from the leaves of kahere ki Ōkiwi, Aotea’.
In the twentieth century, Pākehā textile artists were also literally reaching into the land and squeezing out extracts. Ida Mary Lough’s tapestry Water Grasses (1974) is woven from wool that she dyed using flowers, lichen, leaves and plants taken from swamps and wetlands in and around Ōtautahi Christchurch. Nancy Mason’s Untitled Wall-hanging (1974) is a weave of found natural wool fleeces in shades of brown and cream, carrying the ambience of the back-to-the-land ethos of the times. Bev Moon’s The Lands Turned Beneath Their Hands (2024–2025) is a set of wall-hung sculptures in the shape of worn-out market garden tools used by her Chinese market gardener ancestors. The objects resemble smoke-blackened or tarred relics, disinterred from an archaeological dig. They, too, are of the earth.
In the end, two wāhine Māori artists act as pou or central figures in this telling of the Aotearoa New Zealand landscape as ‘whenua’. One is Robyn Kahukiwa at the beginning of the book, and the other is Emily Karaka, whose extraordinary set of paintings exert mana whenua using the conventions of modernist expressionism, which the artist has transcended and transformed into portent and prophecy to dominate the centre of this book. Oil paintings on kauri board, they have a thrilling emotional intensity as their fiery language confronts a legacy of broken government promises over land, over the whenua. And, as in a hīkoi, these paintings of protest—Ka whawhai tonu mātou!—are attended by a cavalcade of Māori flags and banners. The flags and banners show up in the book’s pages in photographs taken by John Miller of the 1975 Māori Land March and the 2004 Foreshore and Seabed March, and also in a photograph by Emily Marr, Hīkoi Whenua, 4 August, 2019, documenting a political rally intended ‘to protect the whenua’ at Ihumātao in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. The whenua has gone from being designated and depicted as the wastelands, edgelands and margins of colonial times to a contemporary form of iconography, emblazoning resistance, counter-history and a sense of collective belonging for the nation. The story of the ‘whenua’ in Aotearoa New Zealand remains multiple, complex and paradoxical, but in the meantime Whenua affirms the prodigality and richness of the land—of earth, water and sky—as revealed by a small army of contributors.
DAVID EGGLETON is a poet and writer, and the current editor of The Landfall Tauraka Review.
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