Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 5, Number 10, 1 October 1988 — New Zealand Crafts Featured in Museum Show [ARTICLE]

New Zealand Crafts Featured in Museum Show

"Treasures from the Land: New Zealand Craftsmen and Their Native Materials," is a new exhibit of contemporary crafts on display in Bishop Museum's Kahili Room through November 30. The exhibit reveals the strong "ties between contemporary New Zealand crafts, their Maori heritage, and the affinity of New Zealand craftsmen for their land and its products."

It features 73 works by 12 contemporary artisans, working with materials as diverse as native woods and vines, New Zealand jade, and world-renowned New Zealand wool.

The show includes: clay pottery and ceramics by Barry Brickell; inlaid and banded stone coins and ornaments by John Edgar; homegrown and decorated gourds by Geoff Fairburn; woven and decorated flax coats by Rangimarie Hetet and Diggeress Te Kanawa (mother and daughter); bone and ivory sculptures by Owen Mapp; inlaid wooden bowls, boxes and abstracts by Paul

Mason; carved wooden gateways and house posts by Paratene Matchitt; wooden, stone and bone pendants by Stephen Myhre; clay ceramic figures by Denis 0'Connor; nephrite jade, bronze and argillite forms by Donn Salt; and spun and woven wool tapestries by Judy Wilson.

By far the largest and most imposing objects in the exhibition are two intricate and complex eommissioned pieces by Maori carver Paratene Matchitt. A carved, painted and feather-decorated "kuaha" (doorway) forms the focal point of the exhibition and the "poutokomanawa" (main pole of the Maon meeting house, including a carved ancestral figure) keeps watch over all the artifacts in the exhibition.

Among the 12 artisans, gourd maker Geoff Fairburn perhaps best exemplifies the special relationship these artisans have cultivated with the land they eall home. Over a period of many years, Fairburn taught himself the myriad fine points of

gourd culture and now grows his own gourds in his home garden, patterns them with abstract elements of Polynesian design and dyes them with dyes created from the earth and minerals of New Zealand. Skilled weavers Rangimarie Hetet and her daughter, Diggeress Te Kanawa, have almost singlehandedly insured the revival and perpetuation of the traditional Maon skill of weaving "korowai" (dressed flax cloaks). Both mother and daughter eome from the Ngati Maniapoto, a large and important tribe of the Central North Island.

Their "maoritanga," sense of being Maori, is evident not only in their classic weaving, but also in their commitment to sharing their knowledge: they have established a craft center of their own in whieh to pass on their skills to new generations of weavers. "Treasures from the Land" was organized and circulated by the Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibition service.