Shona Rapira Davies
at the Govett-Brewster
CHERYLL SOTHERAN
Shona Rapira Davies's impact on contemporary New Zealand art has gathered momentum and power over recent years. Luit Bieringa's inclusion of three oil paintings Whakakapapa, Song for 900 children: Tautoko for the black women and Survival in his Content/Context exhibition at the National Art Gallery in 1986 was a recognition of the importance of these works, and, implicitly, their highly political agenda. Shona Rapira Davies has single-mindedly pressed her cause as Maori woman artist since her graduation from Otago Polytechnic in 1983 and in fact before that time. Her exhibitions both in Dunedin and after her return to live with her whanau in Northland in 1985 have been characterised by strongly political content moving particularly in recent times to a passionate exploration of the role of the Maori woman in contemporary New Zealand art and culture.
Detail of Shona Rapira Davies’ Ma te wahine ka tupu ai te hanga nei, te tangata, ma te whenua kawhai oranga ai/Woman found raped, Wrapped in a Threadbare Cloak, clay, stone, sand and manuka installation at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, May 1987
Her explorations have led her not only to challenge through content, but also to conduct an often frustrating search for appropriateness of style and medium from the two-dimensional oil paintings exemplified by the Content/Context works to experimentation in sculpture using clay. The readiness to accept, even seek out challenges, made her an obvious choice for Kura Rewiri-Thorsen when she was asked to curate an exhibition of work by contemporary Maori women artists at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery to mark the annual Maori Women's Welfare League conference in New Plymouth in May this year. Davies’s response to the invitation was a proposal for a performance/sculpture installation, to take place over the first week of the exhibition; the work was to be titled Ma te wahine ka tupu ai te hanga nei, te tangata, ma te whenua kawhai oranga ai/Woman found raped, Wrapped in a Threadbare Cloak, and the materials used would be clay, manuka, sand and rocks.
Jehanne Teilhet in her article 'The Role of Women artists in Polynesia and Melanesia' comments: Male hieratic art is promoted in general by males to maintain their own importance. Though the initial division of sexual labour in the [Polynesian and Melanesian] arts may not have been a question of preferences, it has manifested an intriguing set of tapus for artists who want to become professional artists of hieratic forms.(1)
Work in progress on installation
Shona Rapira Davies may or may not acknowledge a new and complex set of tapus associated with the making of art by contemporary Maori women artists, although there is a tension within her work which suggests that she does. There is however no doubt that her art can be seen as hieratic, in its use of images and a technique that Ian Wedde in a review in the Evening Post has described as rhetorical, iconic and declamatory, as well as in its mythic renderings of the tangata whenua. The work made as the result of the artist's performance at the Govett-Brewster used both the directness of figuration and the counterpoint of symbolism in an installation that has strong hybrid qualities, drawing from Maori and non-Maori cultures.
The artist brought with her to New Plymouth a number of ceramic tiles, which had been painted in a manner familiar from her two-dimensional works: like these, also, the tiles carried inscriptions relating to the work. The tiles were laid in a framed bed of sand, taken from the black sand beaches of Taranaki—a connection was thus established between the lands and peoples of Northland and Taranaki. The artist approached the performance with a strong sense of ritual and intensity of purpose. While anxieties about the behaviour of materials, gallery conditions, lighting and other practical concerns brought tension during the days of preparation, the artist, once embarked upon the construction of the woman's figure which was to be the focal point of the installation, become totally absorbed in her work: work became ritual, and the artist clearly found the daily transition from performance to more mundane activities increasingly difficult. The piece consequently gained for those watching a momentum and urgency which heightened its already considerable expressive power. The matter-of-fact statements in the original proposal were transcended by the drama of the event: The artist will work more or less continuously throughout the day beginning each work/performance day at the convenience of the staff and to finish at the time convenient to them. The performance will reflect the effects humidity / temperature / environment etc. will have on the clay body—and the performance will be geared that way too. A reclining figure bigger than life-size will be built and then it will be allowed to dry and eventually to crack and crumble. Manuka hoops will be placed over the body to remind of the sacredness of papatuanuku.(2)
Work in progress on installation
The clay figure built over the days of the performance was a representation in figurative form of the 'woman found raped' of the work's title. The expressive forms of the paintings and of the ceramic tiles of this work, which have elements of both Maori carving and European painting in the expressionist tradition, were here replaced by a monumental realism: the figure was anguished and abandoned but nonetheless suggested the eloquence and dignity of classical tragedy. The artist's characteristically experimental and adventurous approach to the behaviour of materials under various circumstances led her to anticipate that in the case of this work, the atmospheric conditions within the Gallery would have caused the unfired clay of the sculpture to dry and crack, eventually disintegrating completely, thus creating a final and complete subjection of the figurative to the symbolic. Unfortunately the even atmospheric conditions produced by the Gallery's solid construction didn't produce this looked-for effect, and at the end of the exhibition the work, which had suffered only partial deterioration, was dismantled and returned to the artist at her home in Northland.
Work in progress on installation
The choice by this artist of not only the figurative style, but also of the medium of clay for her increasingly monumental and hieratic sculptures is an intriguing reflection of the place she (consciously?) occupies in a cultural cross-current. A major work planned for the Wellington City Art Gallery in 1988 moves the notion of large scale figurative forms working in conjunction with symbolic details within a single work further on from the Govett-Brewster installation. The Wellington work is to include lifesize terra cotta figures of women, and woven mats and panels to be made by Maori women artists from Northland. The piece has, at least in the concept stage, similarities with such major historical works as the Chinese Buried Army. The layers of context and meaning in Shona Rapira Davies's works are far beyond such an obvious comparison, and reflect the very real complexity of her existence as a contemporary Maori woman and artist.
1. Jehanne Teilhet, 'The Role of Women Artists in Polynesia and Melanesia' in Art and Artists of Oceania edit. Mead Kernot, Dunmore Press, Palmerston North 1983, pp. 45-56. 2. Artist's proposal to the Govett-Brewster Gallery.