Adorning Indigenous bodies: Maori, Pasifika and other Indigenous perspectives
2 December 2022 at 2:30:00 am
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Session Convenors
Associate Professor Ngarino Ellis, The University of Auckland
Session Speakers
Associate Professor Ngarino Ellis, The University of Auckland
Dr Patricia Te Arapo Wallace, University of Canterbury
Dr Kirsten Lyttle, Monash University
Adornment is an important global practice which enables makers and wearers to demonstrate their social, political and economic identities. These operate within complex and ever-changing landscapes. In Indigenous communities such as Maori and Pasifika, the selection of different materials and technologies create works which respond to contemporary issues and events. The practice of wearing and layering adornments themselves asserts sovereignty over the body, often disrupting narratives of gender, mana and tapu. We welcome papers that explore the dynamic of adornment, both physical forms as well as the practices which enact values and histories. Nau mai, haere mai – welcome.
“I shou’d consider it as a nosegay” – a hint of traditional Māori perfume practice
Dr Patricia Te Arapo Wallace, University of Canterbury
Some early European artists have left us images that depict Māori wearing various forms of unfamiliar neck ornaments. On James Cook’s first voyage in 1769, the surgeon Monkhouse noted the Māori practice of wearing perfumed objects around their necks. Similarly, early ethnologists recorded the custom of Māori wearing perfumed sachets at their necks, but by the time they were writing, it seems that such items had apparently ceased to be made.
However, this paper examines an unusual artefact in the University of Gottingen Collection, which may be the last remaining example. Currently incorrectly identified, this item offers a tantalizing glimpse into the traditional environmental knowledge of the ancestral Māori world. At the same time, it also identifies potential challenges for the recovery and protection of traditional knowledge in the future.
Whakaahua: the story of making a digital cloak
Dr Kirsten Lyttle, Monash University
I am a Māori-Australian photographer and weaver. Māori weaving has become an important part of my arts practice, as it offers a fundamental link with, and connection to, my Māori heritage. At times, my weaving practice has not sat comfortably with my photography. Afterall, there is a long history of the objectification of Māori and other colonised Indigenous people through the lens of the camera. It is only since the late 1960s that Māori have used to camera to tell our own stories and record our communities and ways of thinking. While contemporary Māori artists and scholars have shown digital technologies are not necessarily a threat to indigenous cultural integrity, it is also true that photography not only recorded Māori weaving practice, but it also actively reshaped it. Due to photography, decorative tāniko borders of Māori cloaks were moved from the side and bottom borders to the top; effectively presenting these garments upside down. Through my creative practice-lead research and utilizing my methodology - whakaahua (to photograph, to transform) - I argue that the photograph can be “Māorified”; transformed into an indigenous object through employing kaiwhatu (Māori customary weaver) techniques. So that the photograph becomes both a site and a material for making customary Māori artworks such as a kahu huruhuru (feather cloak).
Me he manu rere: The use of birds in and as adornment by Māori in the 19th century.
Associate Professor Ngarino Ellis, The University of Auckland
Hand-size fluffy white bundles of albatross in the ear. Large bird wings attached to the head. Single live birds pushed through a hole in the ear to die slowly. Thin bird feathers piercing the nose. These are only some of the wide varieties of styles that Māori in the 19th century used birds and their feathers and other parts to adorn their bodies. These materials held significant cultural, political, and economic meanings in themselves, and would be deployed to communicate rapidly changing social, gender, and community identities. In focusing on a single material, and drawing on oral, written, and visual histories as well the taonga themselves, this talk will build on growing research which reveals the 19th century Māori body as not only reflecting important values about mana and tapu, but also generating new ideas about beauty, power, and community.
Biographies
Associate Professor Ngarino Ellis, The University of Auckland
Ngarino Ellis (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou) is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Auckland. She has been researching and teaching about Māori art and architecture for the past 25 years. This paper is part of the project Ngā Taonga o Wharawhara: The World of Māori Body Adornment (2020-3). Ngarino is completing, with Deidre Brown Toi Te Mana: A History of Indigenous Art from Aotearoa New Zealand (due 2023). Her first sole-authored book A Whakapapa of Tradition: One Hundred Years of Ngāti Porou Carving 1830-1930 (2016) won several awards including at the Ockhams, and Māori Book Awards. Ngarino’s teaching includes Maori Art, Art Crime, Gender, and Indigenous Peoples and Museums.
Dr Patricia Te Arapo Wallace, University of Canterbury
Currently hosted by Aotahi School of Māori and Indigenous Studies at the University of Canterbury, Patricia Te Arapo Wallace (Ngati Porou) has been researching elements of Māori dress since 1993. In her 2002 PhD thesis examining evidence of traditional Māori dress from the mid-seventeenth century to 1820, she was able to validate the work of contemporary graphic artists and establish that many early European images of Māori, previously un-researched, offered a valuable and largely reliable source of ethnological data. She continues to research woven taonga and is also working with a small group of weavers to explore the potential of replication-related experimentation in the recovery and understanding of technologies of the past.
Dr Kirsten Lyttle, Monash University
Dr Kirsten Lyttle is a Naarm (Melbourne) based artist and academic who is of Māori descent. Her iwi (tribe) is Waikato, (Ngāti Tahinga, Tainui). Her work explores the intersection of indigenous customary art practice and digital technologies. She has over 11 years teaching experience and has taught photography, art history and visual art, at a range of universities including Master of Photography - RMIT University, Critical Art and Theory - Victorian College of the Arts at The University of Melbourne, Deakin University and Photography Studies College. She is currently the Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Wominjeka Djeembana Indigenous Research Lab, MADA, Monash University.