Auahatia: Creative Innovation 30.11.22 — 04.02.23
Monday to Friday | 10am — 5pm Saturday | 11am — 3pm
Mark Hutchins-Pond Specialist, Art mark@webbs.co.nz +64 4 555 6011
Karen Rigby Business Manager karen@webbs.co.nz +64 4 555 6011
23 Marion Street Te Aro Wellington 6011 webbs.co.nz
Auahatia: Creative Innovation is an exhibition that presents customary, contemporary and new media art by te Whanganui-a-Tara’s finest emerging and established Māori artists.
Themes of whakapapa, histories, identity and indigeneity that inform connection to whenua and iwi flows through the exhibition with works by Hariata Ropata Tangahoe, Hemi MacGregor, Stevei Houkāmau, Tracy Keith, Suzanne Tamaki, Jamie Berry, and Terence Turner.
All works are available to purchase.
Auahatia: Creative Innovation runs from Wednesday 30 November 2022 until Saturday 4 February 2023.
For further information, please contact our specialist team.
1 Hariata Ropata Tangahoe Te Ira Tipua 2020–22 acrylic on canvas 900 × 750mm price $15,000
2 Hariata Ropata Tangahoe Po Marie 2020–22 acrylic on canvas 1050 × 750mm price $17,000 1
Hariata Ropata Tangahoe was born in Otaki in 1952 and is of Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Raukawa, Te Atiawa, Celtic and Italian descent. She spent her early childhood on the Kapiti Coast, then moved to Auckland.
In 1984, Tangahoe returned to the Kapiti Coast, intrigued by the stories of her female ancestors and how they had occupied their coastal landscape. Tangahoe began her tertiary studies in Art at Waikato Polytechnic, and later attained a Masters degree from Elam School of Fine Arts. She considers her post-graduate studies at Elam to be a turning point in achieving deeper understanding of her tupuna and iwi histories.
“My whakapapa is the foundation of the conceptual narratives in my paintings.”
Her art practice is grounded in the importance of customary knowledge. “It’s all about connection... It’s not about me; it’s about us — all Māori, trying to recover what we lost as a result of colonisation.”
Tangahoe approaches her painting as an intuitive process in which she creates images from her imagination guided by the many threads of her whakapapa. Her paintings take the viewer to otherworldly, timeless places of primordial memory beyond conscious experience.
Tangahoe’s work is held in numerous public and private collections throughout Aotearoa, including Te Papa Tongarewa, the Museum of New Zealand, The Dowse, The Fletcher Trust and BNZ Collections.
Hariata Ropata Tangahoe (Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Raukawa, Te Atiawa)
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5 Hariata Ropata Tangahoe Tui Tui a Hui 2020–22 acrylic on canvas 500 × 610mm price $10,000
6 Hariata Ropata Tangahoe Hinemoana c1990 hand-carved Totora 160 × 550mm (widest points) price $6,000
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7 Hariata Ropata
Tangahoe Hinekiu Piripi-Kohe 2003–04
acrylic on canvas with hand carved frame 2350 × 1130mm price $45,000
8 Hariata Ropata
Tangahoe Mei Carkeek-Higgott 2003–04
acrylic on canvas with hand-carved frame 2350 × 1130mm price $45,000
Hemi Macgregor’s current practice originates from observing the changing of the seasons moving from the winter months into spring and on into the long summer days. In watching the natural environment come alive with the flowering and fruiting of new life. Macgregor draws on specific geometric structures, patterns and processes found predominantly in raranga, tukutuku, taniko and seeks to re-establishes this knowledge into in his current context and reality.
The patterns and forms used in these paintings speak directly to values, beliefs and attitudes held by Māori around abundance and sustainability, patterns like pātiki reference the abundance of
flounder in the summer months and as they move from the oceans into rivers with the warming of the waters.
Macgregor’s approach to painting utilises a moving language of colours blending and transitioning over a dark void where the ambiguity of what is the positive and negative space frees the viewer to consider the movement of light on the surface of water or a sea of falling kowhai flowers, Macgregor wants us all to value the uniqueness of our eco-systems and the benefits they afford us. Macgregor works between his responsibility to customary Māori knowledge and the needs of his contemporary reality and sees his practice as part of the continuum of Māori visual arts.
Hemi Macgregor (Ngāti Rakaipaaka/Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāi Tūhoe)10
9 Hemi Macgregor Ua Kowhai 2022 acrylic on plywood 2 x 1500mm × 1500mm price $28,000 or $15,000 each
10 Hemi Macgregor Te Rua Pātiki 2020 acrylic on plywood 1085mm × 1550mm price $8,400
Stevei Houkāma, of Ngāti Porou and Te Whānau ā Apanui decent, affirms whakapapa as the center of her uku practice. Stretching through and beyond her biography, her works connect with legacies of Māori making, migration from te Moana nui a kiwa, and kinship ties with Atua, exploring the spiritual connection from Atua to tāngata.
Houkāma’s series of whakapapa chains consist of seed forms in black, terracotta and white clay. Seeds have an ongoing metaphorical resonance for the artist. These works visualise an intergenerational concept through seeds. All seeds come from somewhere, and all seeds can potentially sew. Marked this way between offspring and eventual progenitor, the seed sits in the middle of time, between past and future, connected equally to both directions. This metaphor is emphasised through the act of chaining — linking each seed to its place in the in-between.
Stretching back into the whakapapa of Māori forms then allows Houkāmau to simultaneously reach across waters and reconnect with shared customs across the ocean.
Houkāmau’s mahi acknowledges Māori migration from and the kinship ties with Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa. Her characteristic carved marks, which combine tā moko, tatauinspired patterns and designs, reflect the blended Māori/ Pasifika demographics of Cannons Creek, Porirua, where Houkāmau was raised.
E kore au e ngaro, he kākano I ruia mai I Rangiātea
I shall never be lost, a seed scattered from Rangiatea
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11 Stevei Houkāma Ruataupare te whanau (Tokomaru Bay) 2022 white raku clay, wood fired at Baye Riddles, Tokomaru Bay price $1,400
14 Stevei Houkāma and Terence Turner Ngāru tāroa the enduring wave 2022 whitestone clay, pounamu, sealer, acrylic paint, spray paint price $4,500
12 Stevei Houkāma Punga a Pawa 2022 black clay, muka price $690
15 Stevei Houkāma Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua 2022 black terracotta clay, harakeke, acrylic paint, wax cord price $8,900
13 Stevei Houkāma Ipu Wai 2002 white Raku clay, muka, feathers price $1,950
16 Stevei Houkāma Tama a Tāne 2021 whitestone clay, muka, feathers price $980
Tracy Keith’s unique sculptural ceramics evoke memories of whenua, reflecting something at once primeval and timeless. An artist who works predominantly in raku clay, Keith stretches, pushes and molds his forms combining an organic sensibility with shapes and embellishments that, at times, resemble machine parts. The surfaces of his vessels bring to mind industrial fabrications. Their surfaces appear raw and organic with little or no glaze, referencing their previous natural form and the contortion of factory processing.
“Accepting that weathered shapes and surfaces are at harmony with the simple bowl form gives me a platform to treat these works more like sculpture than pottery. The uneven surface of each piece references the weathered and layered structures of the land and the impact of human activity and industry”
Keith adapts his understanding of whakapapa to consider the history of clay, contrasting the ancient Japanese firing technique of raku with the newer methods of ceramic artists such as Yo Akiyama and Peter Voulkos. His influences show Keith’s interest in being led by the physical qualities of clay and how these can be used to represent his experiences of te ao Māori within current times. Keith has a Master of Fine Arts from the Whitecliff College of Art and Design.
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Tracy Keith
Sound of the Land
Raku fired ceramic 270mm × 330mm price $3,500
18 Tracy Keith Visceral
Raku fired ceramic 280mm × 400mm price $3,500
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Tracy Keith Political Anvil
Raku fired ceramic 280mm × 700mm price $4,500
20 Tracy Keith Fission
Raku fired ceramic 400mm × 700mm price $5,500
21 Tracy Keith Numinous
Suzanne Tamaki (Maniapoto, Tuhoe) is an artist and social provocateur who uses fashion and photography to create visual narratives that respond to cultural politics in Aotearoa. Her works often investigate the nature of indigenous feminisms in the South Pacific, challenging the colonial gaze and Western ideas of nationhood within a bi-cultural nation.
As an individual artist and as a member of Pacific Sisters and the SaVAge K’lub art collectives, Tamaki has
exhibited works extensively throughout the country and internationally.
She has presented work at Te Papa Tongarewa (2018), Sharman Gallery Winnipeg (2017), The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (APT8, Brisbane, Australia, 2016), Expressions Arts Centre (Upper Hutt, 2015), City Gallery Wellington (2011), the British Museum (England, 2008), the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (England, 2005) and the Dowse Art Museum (2004).
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A chain is only as strong is it’s weakest link pigment ink on paper
820 × 615mm price $7,000 (unframed)
23 Suzanne Tamaki
A house divided against itself cannot stand pigment ink on paper 820 × 615mm price $7,000 (unframed)
24 Suzanne Tamaki Actions speak louder than words pigment ink on paper 820 × 615mm price $7,000 (unframed)
25 Suzanne Tamaki
It is better to give than to receive pigment ink on paper 820 × 615mm price $7,000 (unframed)
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Out of sight, out of mind pigment ink on paper
820 × 615mm price $7,000 (unframed)
Jamie Berry, of Te Aitanga-a-Mahaki, Rongowhakaata, Ngāti Porou and Ngāpuhi decent, is a multidisciplinary artist who creates work that examines Aotearoa histories while reflecting on her identity and place within the current timeline.
Originally from Tūranganui-a-kiwa, Berry now resides in te Whanganui-a-Tara. Both sites inform her practice that is whakapapa, past, present and future focused. She explores this by reimagining stories through digital content, DNA soundscape, moving images and installation.
Berry is known for wielding light in dark spaces to create a dramatic impression of movement and life. Paired with audio soundscapes that resonate and drive the narrative, Berry engages with local and global indigenous issues.
Her work ‘Whakapapa/Algorithms’ was selected to show at the Beijing International Art Biennale and premiered at the Oberhausen Film festival 2022.
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Tāniko Pūwhero series, (in order of layout) Tahi, Rua, Toru, Wha, Rima, Ono
6 lightboxes, black vinyl wrap exterior case, plug-in module with power outlet, prints digitally printed images on Yuppo synthetic paper 594 × 841 × 24mm (each box) price $5,000 each
28 Jamie Berry Nanny Huia
Lightbox, black vinyl wrap exterior case, plug-in module with power outlet, digitally printed images on Yuppo synthetic paper
594 × 841 × 24mm price $6,000
Jamie Berry (Te Aitanga-a-Mahaki, Rongowhakaata, Ngāti Porou, Ngāpuhi)
As a sculptor, Terence Turner (Tainui) uses physical forms as a language to communicate stories by deriving a core concept from an abstraction. His art leaves the observer to draw their own connections that suggest the universal longing for identity, connection and culture. Turner manipulates the capacity of certain objects to speak for themselves and how they hold their place in time, culture and references.
In his work with pounamu, Turner explores the fluid importance of the taonga. The diverse and changing tikanga and oral traditions associated with pounamu, and the stories behind each piece reflect its being as a living entity that can be honoured in his carving.
‘It’s in the negative space that I find the humanity of an object. The intimate shape inside a shoe. The memory of the mountain that lingers around a carving. These spaces are home to the object’s memory and where the stories live.’
‘With this continuing series, I’m exploring how stories and myths shape, haunt and define us, and how they’ve survived and evolved over millennia of memory, retelling, propaganda and repurpose.’
Turner looks for the roots of these myths and how they connect between the original intention with which they were made and the meaning they have assumed for us today. He questions where history ends and the narrative begins in objects representing a perceived finished story.
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29 Terence Turner A Lullaby for Asterion 2022
Muriwai basalt, Arahura pounamu, steel 700 × 350 × 250mm (widest points) price $25,000
30 Terence Turner The Persistence of Memory 2022
New Zealand West Coast serpentine, Australian black jade 160 × 200 × 120mm (widest points) price $15,000
Mark Hutchins-Pond Specialist, Art +64 22 095 5610 mark@webbs.co.nz
Karen Rigby Business Manager +64 22 344 5610 karen@webbs.co.nz
Auctions Private Sales Valuations webbs.co.nz
wellington 23 Marion Street Te Aro Wellington, 6011