The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

158 Reuben Paterson Pathways through history In the monumental Whakapapa: get down upon your knees 2009, created for APT6 and installed on the soaring wall of the Gallery of Modern Art’s Long Gallery, Reuben Paterson combines his well-known motifs of fabric patterns, glitter and optically dazzling structures. Paterson is a young Auckland-based artist of Ngati Rangitihi and Scottish pakeha (non-Māori) descent. His practice draws from a combination of popular culture references, Pacific kitsch and Māori ancestral symbolism. Whakapapa: get down upon your knees is comprised of 16 richly patterned canvases abutted in a grid to form a work eight metres square. Its motifs relate to fabric patterns Paterson has encountered throughout his life, from sources as diverse as wallpaper, Hawaiian shirts, women’s frocks and men’s ties. Bisected diagonally, each module is comprised of two different patterns, arranged so that the final composition resembles a kaleidoscope. Glitter and diamond dust are incorporated into the paint, creating shimmering surfaces. The art work’s title suggests its concern with Māori whakapapa (genealogy). Papa means anything broad, flat and hard, such as a flat rock, slab or board; while whakapapa is to place in layers, or lay one upon another, and to name and recite one’s genealogy in proper order. 1 While exuberant in appearance, the painting also refers to sad and sober events in Paterson’s life. His fabric motifs pay homage to his mother’s whakapapa , in particular to her mother, whom he never met. Many of the patterns are drawn from fabrics popular in the 1960s, when Paterson’s kuia (grandmother) was known for her fashionable party frocks, before depression and alcoholism led to her suicide. In some of the patterns, stylised versions of kowhaiwhai are discernable. Paterson consistently invokes Māori customs in his practice, such as these sacred and special patterns, to denote familial groups and alliances. He explains: The black kowhaiwhai pattern is called Puhoro . It is found on the waka (canoe), which links directly to whakapapa in that they brought our ancestors to Aotearoa, and also to swift movement. I use this kowhaiwhai to recite and create the motion of time, like that of whakapapa , and that of a turning kaleidoscope. 2 The red–black–white pattern that sits against this kowhaiwhai design is from a Pucci fabric reworked by Paterson to contain more koru (the unfurling frond of the silver fern, a frequent motif in Māori culture). The kaleidoscopic structure enfolds and refracts the individual fabric patterns. Paterson describes the resulting form in terms of the Māori concept of the dark centre: A central concept in these new works reiterates my gratitude to life and acknowledges life’s juxtaposition to misdeed through the sequential recital of the various names for the first states of existence designated Te Kore (the void), Te Po (the dark), and Te Ao Marama (the world of light). Te Po , as the celestial realm, relates to the aeons of time when the earth came into being and is the phenomenological state these new works issue forth, divide and then unify from. 3 Reuben Paterson layers a personal symbology that melds Māori traditions with Western cultural modalities into cultural forms, reinventing cultural specificity and symbolic power. In his fabrications and reconstructions, working through genealogies interrupted by marginalisation and social malaise, Paterson constructs new pathways through history. Angela Goddard Endnotes 1 Reuben Paterson, email to Maud Page, Queensland Art Gallery, 13 October 2009. 2 Paterson, email to Maud Page. Paterson continues: ‘ Kowhaiwhai is most often found in the whare , or meeting house ridgepole ( tahu ) and on the rafters ( heke ). The patterns most often represent tribal genealogy. The main line of descent, beginning with the founding ancestor, is depicted as a single continuously flowing pattern. On the rafters, patterns depict diverging branches of descent. The fact that kowhaiwhai is used to depict tribal lineage carries with it associations of “authority by descent”’. 3 Paterson, email to Maud Page.