The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

There were no Oceanic art objects in my parents’ living room, but I have them in my own home — predominantly textiles, whose elegant sculptural forms and rich textures engage the body in very intimate ways. My daughter often falls asleep watching TV on a Samoan mat. This contrasts strongly with the enigmatic, unpeopled interiors in your paintings. Can you talk about this unnerving quality in your work? The description of your home is how I imagine many modern homes throughout the South Pacific, and beyond (including my own), which use various contemporary Pacific art works as decoration, or objects that take on a new function. However, within my paintings, I wish to create idealised spaces made up of fragments from ancient times, as well as the not-so-distant past. They are generally of the 1950s and 1960s, which, for me, saw a point of intersection of Western and non-Western cultures within the homes of many collectors and consumers. I have placed within these open-ended spaces less familiar tribal artefacts that have more mysterious or unusual characteristics, and it is the seamless collision of these worlds that creates a subtle tension, or what you refer to as an ‘unnerving quality’. Describing an Oceanic sculpture in his collection, the surrealist André Breton once said: ‘it ogles us from the depths of shell’. 1 Breton’s collection has informed the development of your ‘Lounge Room Tribalism’ paintings, where the objects also appear to hold their ground, looking directly at the viewer. How important is this aspect of your art, and what are you trying to say about these objects? I am reminded of a comment by [Swiss sculptor and painter] Giacometti who said: ‘New Hebrides sculpture is true and more than true, because it has a gaze. It’s not the imitation of an eye; it’s purely and simply a gaze.’ In many of my works, ethnographic objects glare blankly out from walls or shelves, and it is hoped these objects take centre stage with the absence of human inhabitants — or have they recently left the room? For me, these objects no longer emanate the power of the Old World, but are historically aestheticised as objects of the New, thereby raising questions of context, assimilation, ownership and authenticity. In a broader sense, what I try to suggest is the complex relationship between Western and non-Western cultures, and how many indigenous artists today are subject to influence and transformation in the advent of globalisation. In your discussion of ‘Lounge Room Tribalism’, you talk not only about the influence of Breton, but also the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson. A recent essay describes your process as ‘visual storytelling’. 2 Oratory and the sharing of stories play an important role in many Pacific cultures. How important is the role of narrative in your work? Stevenson’s novella The Beach of Falesá 1892 was an important contributing factor in the development of the ‘Lounge Room Tribalism’ works. Stevenson describes a ‘haunted’ cave created by a colonial trader to control the indigenous people by appropriating their beliefs and traditions and turning these structures against them. This lair is equipped with musical contraptions, carved idols and a luminous mask, and could only be viewed by the islanders at nightfall to experience its full ‘magical’ effect. This vivid image, combining Western and non-Western objects within an enclosed environment, spurred me to create similar environments where tribal objects are domesticated within private dwellings. These works can then be read as a footnote to the novella by Stevenson, who presents us with a fictitious microcosm from which we can consider the realities and the effects of colonialism. I think of paint as an illusionistic surface, but also of objects being covered in colours or pigments which have ‘magical’ qualities, and how such effects may be disrupted or emphasised by the artist’s hand. The mark of the artist is important to me in my current work. In previous series (‘Mistints’, ‘Stigma Series’, ‘Wallflowers’), there was no trace of the hand and so a sense of the mystery of the making prevailed. For this series, despite the thin application of paint, I wanted to get as close as possible to carving the objects in the canvas through applying paint with chisel-edged brushes, as well as using colours of the earth, such as burnt and raw umber, burnt sienna, yellow ochre and Venetian red. Concepts underpinning my sculptural works included sympathetic magic in terms of similarity and contagion, and by this, I mean, one could draw on the magical energies of ancient tribal forms through imitation and contact. It is hoped that this form of magical transference may also be true of the objects in my paintings, where tribal forms, once viewed with awe and dread, are recontextualised within domestic modernist settings, but still resonate with latent magical energies. Interviewed by Ruth McDougall, July 2012. 1 André Breton, Oeuvres Complétes , Volume 3 , Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, 1999, p.415. 2 James Pinker, ‘Foreword’, in Lounge Room Tribalism: Graham Fletcher , Mangere Arts Centre – Nga Tohu o Uenuku, Auckland, 2012, p.5. GRAHAM FLETCHER An interview GRAHAM FLETCHER New Zealand b.1969 Untitled (from ‘Lounge Room Tribalism’ series) 2010 Oil on canvas / 162 x 130cm / Purchased 2010 with funds from the Estate of Lawrence F King in memory of the late Mr and Mrs SW King through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery 114