THE ART OF MODERN MAORI CARVING

Te Ao Hou, September 1959, Page 48

THE ART OF MODERN MAORI CARVING There are many books describing the elementary techniques of carving, the proper forms of the spirals and the decorative patterns and all the other conventional features of Maori art. But these conventions, added all together, would still never make a carved meeting house. The carved house is the supreme representation of the history of the tribe; in the absence of a written literature this history was set down in the form of pictures in wood, each picture being a supreme moment in the lives of the ancestors. The modern carver, just like his forebears, aims to tell a tribal story in striking pictures. Some of these pictures are already traditional, like Tamatekapua, who is always shown on stilts. The carver who first thought of this picture wanted to show the old chief in one of his most characteristic activities: he was known as a very ingenious thief and it was said that he would never leave footprints behind; so he was represented on one of his thieving expeditions walking on stilts to avoid recognition. To-day, every carver who wishes to know Tamatekapua shows the stilts: they have become entirely traditional and in fact the stilts are the feature by which Tamatekapua may be recognised in any Arawa meeting house. Similarly traditional is the representation of Hine Amaru, seen in the Waitangi meeting house. As John Taiapa told me, she gave birth to a child from the armpits and this miraculous event is shown in any carvings of that ancestress. In treating such subjects, the Maori carver has much the same task as the Christian artist of the middle ages reproducing moments in the life of Christ: tradition determined precisely what should be on the picture (e.g., the three black Magi had to bear opulent gifts standing in front of a cradle and there had to be haloes round the heads of the Magi and of the Divine Child). Yet within these limits an artist can still do powerful work as he relives the old story and expresses it in his own way and with his own individual skill. At the end of the Middle Ages, European art moved in a quite different direction and one can already see