Page 272 - Constructing Craft

At a time when New Zealand is moving closer to a more
balanced bi-cultural situation are we, Maori and Pakeha, going
to tolerate this type of behaviour from judges, selectors and art
gallery staff? Are artists not permitted to explore all aspects of
their own country? Are we to look over our shoulders to check
whether our influences are “permissible” before we put paint to
canvas or tool to wood? Now that Maoris are working in the
field of ceramics are we to make the statement[:] “Sorry you are
not accepted using clay, it’s not of your ethnic background”?
Are Pakeha potters going to be told[:] “Sorry you can’t use any
Japanese ethnic content’? And when will New Zealand
Museums [sic] start recognising that what is happening in the
contemporary carving,[sic] of wood, jade, bone and ivory is not
a separate movement but a natural, blended, continuation from
pre-European New Zealand, to our present period by the mixed
34
blood, bi-cultural, state of the New Zealand population.

Brian Flintoff

Brian Flintoff, as noted earlier, was another Pākehā working right at the interface of

two cultures. Flintoff’s skill and understanding of Māoritanga appeared to convince

South Island Māori of his sincerity. The ‘Nga Taniwha’ exhibition of 1984 was
opened with Māori rituals and an address by Steve (later Sir Tipene) O’Regan, chair

35
of the Ngāi Tahu Trust Board. Although some questions about the mixing of two
craft forms continued to be asked. Brett Riley, who reviewed the exhibition for the

New Zealand Listener, observed that Flintoff’s works were not copies of traditional

Māori craft but were reinterpretations of legends. He admired Flintoff’s skill,
particularly in those pieces which departed most from the tradition of bone carving,

but he detected, in the departure, a loss: ‘The paradox is simply that straying too far
into formal abstraction and pure form can dilute the sense of supernatural mystery

and fearsome power of the legendary creatures which were Flintoff’s stimulus in the
36
first place.’ Riley’s central point was that makers might have to decide if they were
working in traditional or contemporary form – whether they in fact were traditional

Māori craftspeople, which of course Flintoff could not be, or were they Pākehā
Modernists, reinterpreting traditional designs? Flintoff’s carvings, according to Riley,

were most successful in the second form. The fusion of Māori craft and Pākehā
craft, it seems, could never be complete and continued to be problematic.

Constructing Craft