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3 MAY – 27 JULY 2025

PAULINE KAHURANGI YEARBURY: COMING INTO VIEW MEGAN TAMATI-QUENNELL

Pauline Kahurangi Yearbury (1928–1977) is an important Māori artist whose work and practice we are only just rediscovering. Largely overlooked in both New Zealand and Māori art and within the established narratives of modernism, Yearbury’s impact and influence has only recently come back into view. After not featuring in exhibitions since the early 1970s Yearbury, as an artist, has re-materialised in recent years. Her work has gained attention retrospectively and has appeared in exhibitions following more than 40 years of quiet.

Since 2020 her work has been presented in exhibitions in Aotearoa and Australia: Toi Tū, Toi Ora, the large survey of contemporary Māori art held at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki (2020); Ten Thousand Suns, the 24th Bienniale of Sydney (2024), Sydney, Australia; and Modern Women: Flight of Time (2024), focused on New Zealand modernist women artists, also held at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. In these contexts, Yearbury has been acclaimed as an important Māori artist, an under recognised contemporary artist, and a leading Māori woman artist. Life in forms curated by Hester Rowan continues the momentum but accelerates the focus, being the first survey exhibition and the first solo show of Yearbury’s work in a public art gallery. Works loaned from public and private collections feature in the show, including a number from the Blomfield collection held at Russell Museum Te Whare Taonga o Kororāreka, a collection of works that were posthumously and presciently gifted to that institution by Yearbury’s family.

Life in forms covers Yearbury’s early work from the 1940s, created while she was at Elam School of Fine Arts in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. It moves into the 1950s, 60s and 70s when she was based in Kororāreka Russell with her husband Jim Yearbury and highlights the development of what have become recognised as her signature art practice, her shallow relief wood panels. It also presents the last works we know Yearbury created, a group of paintings that were used as illustrations in her book The Children of Rangi and Papa: The Maori Story of Creation The book was published the year before the artist’s premature death in 1977, at the age of 50.

Born in Matauri Bay, Te Tai Tokerau Northland, Pauline Yearbury (née Blomfield) is the daughter of Valentine Blomfield and Waiatua Hikuwai Ihaia and of Ngā Puhi descent. In 1943 she began to study fine art at Elam. At art school she became skilled at life drawing using life models. Her drawings surmounted what has been determined as ‘the house style of Elam’ of the period and contain traces of influence from her teachers at the art school: AJC Fisher, A Lois White and John Weeks. Yearbury’s early drawings are said to demonstrate A Lois White’s drawing method particularly, ‘which balanced crisp lines with careful graduated shading.’ 1 While at art school Yearbury joined a collective called the New Group, made up of teachers and graduates who were interested in representation rather than abstraction and painted murals that denoted events in Aotearoa’s history. The collective included artists such as Ida Eise, James Turkington and Māori artist Selwyn Wilson of Ngāti Maru and Ngāti Hine descent, as well as Elam tutors and artists A Lois White and May Smith.

In 1949 Yearbury completed her studies at Elam, becoming the first Māori artist to graduate in fine arts in the country. For a long time it was suggested that her contemporary Selwyn Wilson (Ngāti Maru, Ngāti Hine) a painter then a ceramicist who graduated in 1952, was the first Māori artist to graduate from Elam. Arnold Wilson (not related), a sculptor of Ngāi Tuhoe descent who graduated in 1954, was also for a time considered to be the first Māori artist to graduate from Elam. Yearbury, because of the customary male and western orientation of art history, was overlooked. Indigenity and women have routinely been left out of the conventional narratives of art history. It is only recently, through the focused scholarship of Māori and First Nations art histories, that omissions such as this have begun to be addressed.

As one of the first Māori women to be working within the field of modern art, Yearbury can be understood as a Māori modernist artist and more specifically as a woman of Māori modernism. Other Māori women artists of this period include: Kāterina Mataira (Ngāti Porou) a painter, writer, educator and Te Reo expert; Marilynn Webb (Ngati Kahu, Te Roroa) a printmaker and an educator; Cath Brown (Ngai Tahu) an educator, Māori weaver, ceramicist, textile artist, illustrator and iwi advocate; Freda Kawharu (née Rankin) (Ngā Puhi) who graduated in 1955 with a Diploma in Fine Arts in Painting from the School of Fine Arts, Canterbury University College of New Zealand in Ōtautahi Christchurch; Mere Lodge (née Harrison) (Ngāti Porou), and Elizabeth Ellis (née Mountain) (Ngā Puhi, Ngāti Porou), both of whom trained as painters and sculptors and attended Elam in the 1960s, graduating in 1964.

Māori modernism can be defined as a ‘new Māori art’, an alternate or its own form of modernism. It covers a 50-year period from the 1920s to the early 1970s and emerges from the dynamic of Māori urbanisation. Māori migration to the cities from tribal papakāinga or homelands in Aotearoa increased rapidly post World War II, from 1945 through until the 1970s. In 1971 it is recorded that urban Māori dwellers stood at 65%, a sharp contrast to 35 years earlier in 1936 when only 3% of the Māori population lived in urban areas. 2 Māori modernism is made up of a small group of pioneering Māori artists who distanced themselves from customary Māori art forms such as whakairo, Māori carving and mahi raranga, Māori weaving and instead explored the styles and techniques of international modern art. It included the creation of new styles of art that combined Māori ideas, forms or cultural philosophies, including Iwi values and beliefs, with European and American modernism.

Māori modernism saw new work evolve in artforms including painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, illustration, ceramics, photography, set design, filmmaking and architecture. The work of the Māori modernists did not need to be overtly Māori or refer to customary Māori art or culture to be considered Māori modernism. The only shared approach, like contemporary Māori artists of today, was a commitment to contemporary art and their respective mediums.

There was no school of thought or form of practice that the artists shared or had to adhere to – the artists were individuals. International artists who the Māori modernists drew inspiration from include Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brâncuși, Paul Klee, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Ad Reinhart, Mary Miss and Alice Aycock amongst others. Yearbury is thought to have been introduced to Cubism while at Elam by her teacher John Weeks. 3 The incised wood panels that she has become known for are said to have taken their lead from the work of South African artist Cecil Skotnes. 4 Skotnes, once a printmaker, transformed the engraved wooden blocks he used to create block prints into stand-alone artworks. Using the surface of the wooden blocks, Skotness created artworks that were incised, inked and coloured. 5

After completing her studies in 1949, Yearbury took up teaching at Elam and became the first Māori fine arts academic in the country. In 1951, after marrying fellow art student Jim Yearbury in the late 1940s, Yearbury returned to live in Kororāreka Russell. The couple’s return coincided with the growth of a tourist industry in Te Tai Tokerau Northland and saw Yearbury and her husband commissioned to create large murals in the region. Their mural work included a depiction of the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi at the Hobson Lounge of the Waitangi Hotel in 1964, and later in the 1960s, murals for the Whalers Bar at the Willow Bridge Motel in Kororāreka Russell, the Warriors Bar at the Ohaeawai Hotel, and the Duke of Marlborough Hotel in Kororāreka Russell. In 1967 the couple established the Colonial Gallery, their own studio-gallery, where they sold and promoted their work including the incised and coloured wooden panels.

Yearbury’s incised panels are now held in collections such as Te Papa and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. They are made from rimu, a native wood, and feature an array of atua Māori, deities drawn from whakapapa, Māori geneaologies, and creation stories. Collaborative works, the panels include drawings created by Yearbury that were incised by her husband Jim and then stained with dye. Her wooden panels embody a ‘fresh appraisal of customary Māori carving’ 6 and carry her distinctive artistic vision which expressed Māori narratives in stylised and rhythmic forms. Her expression of these narratives is also demonstrated in bold modern style in a series of gouache paintings reproduced as illustrations for her publication The Children of Rangi and Papa: The Maori Story of Creation Yearbury’s book is a contemporary retelling of the Māori creation story recorded by Sir George Grey in Polynesian Mythology in 1855. Yearbury drew on a revised version of Grey’s work from 1956, which featured illustrations by New Zealand artist Russell Clark.

‘The fifteen paintings and fifteen matching poems in this book are a completely fresh and inspired dramatisation of the Maori creation myths. From the beginning, the endless dark, to the multiplication of earth’s creatures in light, each of the recorded incidents and stages in the age-old story is recaptured in clear bold lines – vigorous, evocative lines of verse and strong vivid lines of brush work.’ 7

In her book, Yearbury credits Māori educator Matiu Te Hau and two Māori members of Parliament – Whetu Tirikatene Sullivan, who wrote the publication foreword, and Matiu Rata – for their assistance. She gives a personal thanks in her dedication to her Mother Waiatua Hikuwai Ihaia Blomfield, ‘from whence I am’, and for her husband, Jim, ‘with whom, I am…’ 8

Yearbury wrote about the impetus for the book in the following way:

‘I have always been interested in mythology and legends –it is part of my inheritance. What was important to my ancestors is important to me, but the way that they did their things is no longer important. will not sit in the yard with hammer and chisel –but using traditional myths and legends in more modern idiom is very important, otherwise our culture would become static and die. One must use the legends but interpret them in a modern manner.’ 9

With her paintings and her earlier shallow relief carvings, Yearbury became the first Māori artist to include Māori creation narratives in a modern idiom in her practice, adapting her ‘classical training to create her own style.’ 10 Contemporary Māori artists who followed Yearbury and created contemporary art that focused on whakapapa stories in new idioms include Cliff Whiting, Robyn Kahukiwa and Lisa Reihana.

Before Life in forms and the suite of exhibitions that posthumoustly included her work between 2020 and 2024, Yearbury participated in seminal early exhibitions of modern Māori art. Her work was shown in three exhibitions: the first Māori Festival of the Arts held at Ngāruawāhia in 1963, the Festival of Māori Arts in Kirikiriroa Hamilton in 1966, both organised by artist Paratene Matchitt (Te Whānau-ā-Apanui, Te Whakatōhea, Ngāti Porou), and the exhibition New Zealand Māori Culture and the Contemporary Scene also in 1966. Curated by artist Buck Nin (Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Toa) and educator Baden Pere (Ngati Kahungungu, Rongowhataata, Te Aitanga a Māhaki), it was the first survey of modern Māori art to be hosted by a public institution and to tour internationally. Held at Canterbury Museum, New Zealand Māori Culture and the Contemporary Scene featured works by Yearbury and her contemporaries such as Cath Brown and Kāterina Mataira alongside taonga. Yearbury’s dramatic painting Hatupatu and the Birdwoman (1966), also included in Life in forms, was described as one of the standout works of Nin and Pere’s exhibition.

Life in forms curated by Hester Rowan brings together works that span 30 years and shows the breadth of Yearbury’s practice. Assembling this body of work not only provides us the opportunity to read her practice in a way we have not before, it also adds to our contemporary understanding of her work, and solidifies her significance as a trailblazer and a foundational figure in modern Māori art. Skinner Damian, Modern

Whitcoulls Limited, Christchurch, 1976, p.4 Quoted in ‘Earth and Sky’, publication details unknown, nd, Pauline Yearbury artist file, E H Cormick Research Library, Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tāmaki 10 Yearbury, Pauline, The Children of Rangi and Papa: The Maori Story of Creation, Whitcoulls Limited, Christchurch, 1976, inside front dustcover

This essay was written on the occasion of Pauline Kahurangi Yearbury: Life in forms at Te Uru Contemporary Gallery.

Megan Tamati-Quennell is a leading art curator, writer and researcher of Te Ātiawa, Ngati Mutunga, Taranaki, Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe and Ngāi Tahu descent. She has a 35-year curatorial career specialising in the field of modern and contemporary Māori and Indigenous art. She is the longest serving curator in this field and received a CNZM – a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit – in June 2024 for her contribution to Māori and First Nations art. Megan has held curatorial positions at Te Papa in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington and the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in Ngāmotu New Plymouth. She is currently independent and was one of five curators for to carry Sharjah Biennial 16, in Sharjah in the UAE, 6 February –15 June 2025. Other recent projects include; Emily Karaka: Ka Awatea, A New Dawn curated with Hoor Al Qasimi, President of the Sharjah Art Foundation, the first selected survey show of Senior Māori painter Emily Karaka at Sharjah Art Foundation, 7 September – 1 December 2024. Megan is a PhD candidate at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include Māori modernism, contemporary Māori art, Māori women artists 1930 to today, international First Nations art, First Nations and non-western art in transnational contexts and First Nations art curatorial praxis.

Poster image | Pauline Kahurangi Yearbury, Menu: The Golden Room at the Golden Shears Motor Inn. Collection of Russell Museum Te Whare Taonga o Kororāreka.

This is a menu cover which Yearbury designed for The Golden Room at the Golden Shears Motor Inn in Whakaoriori Masterton. It depicts Māui enacting two of his wondrous feats: slowing the sun’s progress across the sky and fishing up Te Ika-a-Māui, using the powerful jawbone of his ancestor Muri-ranga-whenua.

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