The Maori artist remapping New Zealand’s landscape

‘Encountering Aotearoa’ collects works made or begun during artist Cora-Allan’s two-week journey by ship from the southern to the northern tip of Aotearoa (the Māori name for New Zealand, used by Cora-Allan, an artist of Māori and Niue descent). Focused on coastal sites visited by James Cook on HMS Endeavour in 1769, the exhibition invites visitors to rethink the relationship between Aotearoa and the sea, and between the landscape and the people who inhabit it. Yet rather than offering a settled or resolved vision, Cora-Allan’s work dwells suggestively on the shifting, contested nature of that relationship.

In conversation at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetū during the exhibition’s first stint, the artist described the process of making the untitled mural that begins the exhibition. Painted directly on a gallery wall, the piece is a large-scale depiction of Aotearoa New Zealand’s islands rising precipitously from the sea. The mural’s ochre and black pigments derive directly from the whenua (‘land’ – that is, the soil, flora and fauna of the place as well as the ground itself) depicted. Where it is possible, from one point of view, to think of this painting as an iteration of a well-practised style and motif (Aotearoa’s mountainous topography in earthy tones as seen from the sea), Cora-Allan emphasised the work’s improvisatory nature. She had never before made a mural like this, live before an audience of gallery-goers. She didn’t know how, or even whether, the pigments made from earth and the gum of the native kauri trees would adhere to the walls. (There were some drips.) In fact, she was nervous – something you would not know given the confidence of the finished mural’s spare lines. In her description of the making of this work, as in the exhibition as a whole, process warrants our attention.

Installation view of ‘Cora-Allan: Encountering Aotearoa’ at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū. Courtesy Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū; © Cora-Allan

This is evident both in individual works and in the exhibition’s arrangement and curation. The complexity and particularity of Cora-Allan’s technique, extending to the creation of her materials, is lovingly explained. Most of the works on display here are painted on hiapo, a highly textured cloth originating in Niue and made from the beating, soaking and drying of bark from the paper mulberry tree. Cora-Allan has been at the forefront of the revival of hiapo art, which had gone unpractised for several generations. To make these works, she soaked the mulberry in seawater taken from the places that she would go on to depict on the same sheet, drying each piece of hiapo directly on the windows of her cabin while she was at sea.

The exhibition visitor learns not only that these works were made using pigments derived from whenua but precisely where, for example, Te Ngaere gold or Te Aroha kiwikiwi (gold) came from (Te Ngaere Marae driveway, Ipipiri, and Te Aroha Maunga, respectively) and how Cora-Allan came to collect them (among roadworks; at the side of a creek during a trek). We learn that, where the artist didn’t collect the pigments herself, she bartered for them or was given them by friends. A vitrine in the exhibition’s final room shows the pigments set out in pāua (sea snail) shells alongside Cora-Allan’s sketchbooks, while two video works show the artist and her father, who accompanied her on her trip, describing and demonstrating her process. Walking past the series of coastal landscapes titled While at Sea, framed like views through a ship’s window, it is impossible to escape the sense that, even if we experience these landscapes first as representations, they are also objects, tangibly present in the gallery. While this series possesses an intentional uniformity of composition, both Cora-Allan’s choice of materials and the exhibition’s focus on origins provoke in the viewer heightened attention to specificities of colour and form that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.

Installation view of four works from the series While at Sea (2023) by Cora-Allan. Courtesy Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū; © Cora-Allan

The most remarkable work in the exhibition abandons to a certain extent the documentary quality of While at Sea. Ko ao, ko ao, ko Aotearoa! is a 17-metre-long landscape on plywood. Its scale matches the measurements of the house of James Busby, the Scot who drafted much of the Treaty of Waitangi. Unlike the other landscapes that comprise this show, Ko ao, ko ao, ko Aotearoa! is a collection or collage of diverse ‘whenua shapes’ derived from landscape silhouettes sketched during the whole of Cora-Allan’s trip up the coast of Aotearoa. But far from offering an abstract comment on subjectivity, as Cora-Allan points out, a departure from the ordering of ‘European maps of Aotearoa’ in favour of a landscape ‘shaped according to the landing sites of the different migration waka [canoes] that travelled to Aotearoa from Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa [The Pacific Ocean]’ is explicitly political. Between Cora-Allan’s embarkation and this exhibition’s opening, a new right-wing government lost no time in contesting the 2014 findings of the Waitangi Tribunal that Māori did not cede sovereignty to the British Crown through the Treaty of Waitangi. In the context of this dramatic shift of intended policy, Cora-Allan’s calls to honour the treaty in works such as Encountering Aotearoa right now take on a powerful new resonance.

Installation view of Ko ao, ko ao, ko Aotearoa! (2023) in ‘Encountering Aotearoa’ at the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū. Courtesy Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū; © Cora-Allan

‘Cora-Allan: Encountering Aotearoa’ was at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetū from 13 April–25 August. It opens at Te Kōngahu Museum of Waitangi on 23 November.