Queensland Art Gallery - Queensland Government

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.
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.
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
Reuben Paterson
New Zealand b.1973
Whakapapa: get down upon your knees 2009
Glitter and synthetic polymer paint on canvas /
16 canvases: 200 x 200cm (each) / Image courtesy:
The artist and Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland /
Photograph: Schwere Webber
158 159