GATES/GATEWAYS

SIMON MARCUS SWALE

GATES / GATEWAYS

The humble gate found afronting many a New Zealand property represents a threshold between the public and private realm. Gates and gateways both create and offer the negotiation of liminal space. For Maori, the waharoa is the gateway to the pa or marae, a threshold of immense cultural and spiritual value. More strictly it is the main walk or roadway in the pā, marae or sometimes, burial grounds, and hence itself a liminal space. By passing through the waharoa, one is transcended to another realm.1 As Pakeha te iwi, i have utilised the form of the suburban gate- and its shadow, as a device to explore the potential for explorations into notions of threshold and transcendence, perception and becoming. The gate and its shadow are non-divisible and are mutually inclusive. Neither gate nor shadow exist without the other- their pairing akin to a Deleuzian fold, a non-binary relationship whereby the interior is no more than the fold of the exterior- and vis versa.2 This symiotic relationship is also present in the waharoa. Of the waharoa she has designed for installation in Dunedon’s Octagon, artist Ayesha Green says “when you move through Ko te Tuhono, you are inside and outside, you are coming and going. 3

This work explores also the folded nature of our subjective selves, our relationship to the world from both physical and phenomenological perspectives. I have attempted to create objects, which when worn renegotiate the relationship between subject and object, activating space, the senses and the body. There is an attempt to make sense of the life world: to others, to space, to time and memory, perception and sensation. These gates are an attempt to mediate our relationships with the world; like artist Martin Boyce, I have sought to consider gates as portals- entrances to other places- physical, psychological and emotional. 4

‘‘It is a passage to our landscape, our life and the wairua (spirit) we share with the harbour ... As a monument to our tipuna and our tamariki, Ko te Tuhono transcends time and place.’’ 5

1. Victoria University of Wellington Library. ‘The Pa Maori; Gateways and Enrance Passages. http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-BesPaMa-t1-body-d3d1-d13.html

2. Gilles Deleuze. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota,1988.

3. Otago Daily Times. Interview with Ayesha Green. ‘Public art work to function as gateway.’ https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/public-art-work-function-gateway. 10 June 2020.

4. Tate. ‘Martin Boyce’. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/martin-boyce-7630

5. Otago Daily Times. Interview with Ayesha Green. ‘Public art work to function as gateway.’ https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/public-art-work-function-gateway. 10 June 2020.