The following interview between Brett Graham and Hester Rowan took place on the occasion of Toi Whakaata / Reflections (8 June – 18 August 2024) at Te Uru. This exhibition brings together significant freestanding sculptures and relief works, celebrating Fred Graham’s defiant dedication to making art that speaks to his Māori identity, through the contemporising of traditional Māori art practices and imagery.
Fred Graham (Ngāti Koroki Kahukura, Tainui) was born in Arapuni, Waikato in 1928. In 1950 he was selected by Gordon Tovey to be an art advisor and specialised in Art at Dunedin Teachers’ Training College. In the 1960s Graham met regularly with other artists who were interested in contemporising Māori art, including fellow art advisors Ralph Hōtere and Cliff Whiting. Graham’s work is included in Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Substantial solo exhibitions were held at Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o Waikato in 2012 and 2022. In 2018 he was named an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit. Graham lives in Waiuku and is married to Norma, his wife of 67 years. They have three children, Gary, Kathryn and Brett.
Brett Graham (Ngāti Koroki Kahukura, Tainui) is Fred Graham’s youngest son. He is also an artist and creates large scale sculptures and installations which engage with indigenous histories and politics. He was born in 1967 in Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland in 1988. Graham received a Doctor of Fine Arts from the same institution in 2005. His collaboration with Rachael Rakena, Āniwaniwa, was exhibited at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, and Graham’s sculpture Wastelands is featured in Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Like his father, Graham lives and works in Waiuku.
Hester Rowan (Ngāti Pākehā) is Assistant Curator at Te Uru. She was born in 1996 in Whakatū / Nelson.
Cover image Frederick Graham: An Exhibition of Sculpture and Wood invitation, opening 17 June 1969 at John Leech Gallery. Unknown photographer. Fred Graham artist file. E H McCormick Research Library, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.
This image comes from the invitation for Fred Graham’s first solo exhibition Sculpture in Metal and Wood at John Leech Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau in 1969. The work is titled Bird Form Fountain and features Graham’s now iconic stainless steel birds with water pouring from one bird to the next.
HESTER ROWAN: What is your first memory of Fred as an artist?
BRETT GRAHAM: My father started taking his art seriously in the midsixties, so he was carving, drawing and painting throughout my childhood. The works currently showing in Venice are all from this period. My brother and I shared a room, and we often heard him carving late into the night. The rhythm of the mallet on chisel was quite often the last thing we heard before we slept.
How do you see traditional Māori and modernist influences intersecting in Fred’s work?
The Hunn report, advocating assimilation as the official government policy had come out in the 60s. One of the government’s recommendations was ‘pepper potting’, placing Māori families in Pākehā neighbourhoods so that they would assimilate faster. We were that family. My father felt a real need to tell Māori pūrākau or our ‘legends’ in his art as a way of connecting to that part of his life he had largely left behind him. He did so through a visual language that was influenced by whakairo and the other Māori artforms of kōwhaiwhai and raranga, and yet because of his exposure to modernist art in training college, was fascinated by the work of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth in particular. His early work reflects this intersection of styles. However, have trouble with the term ‘Māori Modernists’ because he was not simply imitating Western artists, he entered into new territory, changing both reference points in the process.
Fred was involved in several group exhibitions with Māori artists in the 1960s and 70s, for example Contemporary Māori Painting and Sculpture, which he organised in Kirikiriroa / Hamilton in 1966 with Ralph Hōtere, Cliff Whiting, Sandy Adsett and ten others. How were these exhibitions received by the public and other artists?
There was resistance from Māori, who feared that Māori art traditions were being adulterated, and Pākehā, who believed Māori art should be frozen in time so that it remained ‘authentic’. Conservative Pākehā and Māori alike were offended by what my father’s generation were doing. From the first arrival of Pākehā in this country Māori art had begun to change. Apirana Ngata established a carving school in the 1920s that tried to turn back the clock, and freeze Māori carving in the 1840s, when the masterpiece Te Hau Ki Tūranga was created by Raharuhi Rukupō. However, not all Māori wanted to copy what Arnold Wilson called a template of a template.
What influences do you think Fred’s practice has had on the next generations of Māori artists?
Collectively, the work of Fred and his peers such as Arnold Wilson and Para Matchitt has been hugely influential, especially on sculptors and carvers. Many of the forms and techniques that even ‘traditional’ carvers have now adopted have been influenced by this movement and incorporate their innovations as ‘tradition’. The branding and marketing that distinguishes our nation all started with their reduction of customary forms, which was then imitated by designers.
Fred explained to me that his parents encouraged him to speak English in order to succeed. How present were te reo Māori and Te Ao Māori in his upbringing?
It was a very different time. Most Māori spoke the reo but it was not advancing them in mainstream society. My father remembers his mother’s father, Tahau Te Wehi, or Tom Edwards as his Pākehā co-workers called him, reciting karakia way into the night. Cultural difference was seen as a hinderance by the dominant culture. In the World Wars, Māori may have paid ‘the price of citizenship’ that Apirana Ngata advocated, but Allied victory re-enforced Anglo-American superiority, and immediately after World War II resistance to government initiatives was considered disloyal. A lot of Māori land was taken by the Public Works Act at that time, including the land around Kārapiro, ‘for the greater good’. My father was the first from his tribe to be sent away to Hamilton to go to school. He boarded with Pākehā families. He wasn’t beaten for speaking Māori, because there was no one to speak Māori to. Sacrifices had to be made.
A number of Fred’s sculptures reference pūrākau, for example Te Wehenga o Rangi rāua ko Papa and Te Ika a Māui. Can you explain the importance of these narratives and the role that storytelling plays in Fred’s art?
My father often talks about how there was an absence of education about our own history when he went to school. Everything reinforced the glory of the British Empire. He has since devoted his life to telling stories about Tainui history and Māori in general to redress this imbalance. The next generation of artists, especially women like Emily Karaka, Shona Rapira Davis and Kura Te Waru Rewiri have focused on social issues like Bastion Point or the Treaty of Waitangi. However, the pioneers of the contemporary Māori art movement such as my father retold the pūrākau of our people lest they be lost.
In a sense it was revolutionary, even mentioning these stories. In this country it was once a rebellious act to say ‘kia ora’—in 1984 Nadia Glavish was stood down from her job as a telephone operator for saying kia ora. It was no easy struggle. Arnold Wilson for example wanted to look at the art of his people when he was at Elam in the 1940s. He was told famously by Archie Fisher, the Head of School, to go back to Tūhoe and put on a grass skirt. Wilson replied that Fisher should go back to Scotland and wear a kilt! Another Sculpture lecturer, John Kavanaugh from Ireland, encouraged Wilson to look at the work of Henry Moore, who had appropriated ‘primitive’ sculpture from Africa and South America. Ironically, this made it acceptable for Māori artists to look at whakairo from their own culture. So Wilson, my father, and others like Para Matchitt were given an ‘acceptable’ pathway to refer to their own Māori art inheritance, ironically because avant-garde English artists were doing so.
The International Art Exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale Stranieri Ovunque Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Perosa, Artistic Director of the São Paulo Museum of Art in Brazil (MASP), focuses on queer and indigenous artists. Can you talk about the significance of Fred’s inclusion in this exhibition, along with yourself and six other Māori artists: Sandy Adsett, Selwyn Te Ngareatua Wilson and art collective Mataaho?
Pedrosa is the first curator of the Biennale from the southern hemisphere. He is trying to redress the balance of how Europe has viewed the world in previous Biennales and be as inclusive of marginalised populations as possible. This is in keeping with his work at MASP. He speaks of the foreigner, the stranger, the queer and the indigenous as ‘foreigners everywhere’. Of course, indigenous people are not strangers in their own lands, even if the mainstream perspective is to treat them so and normalise everything that is foreign to that land. That is the genius of colonisation— simultaneously uplifting the culture of the coloniser while debasing the culture and heroes of those colonised. To this degree my father, in the work represented at the Venice Biennale, is challenging this. He carves the stories that were absent in his childhood, which in the 70s was an act of rebellion. Māui snaring the Sun and Kae riding Tinirau’s whale Tutunui are fundamental Māori stories that prescribe how humanity should respond to the natural world.
How has Fred’s practice influenced your own work as a sculptor?
I have recently returned from the Venice Biennale where Fred’s work and mine are being shown side by side in the Arsenale curated show. As the installation had been prolonged, it was a great comfort to look over my shoulder and see the works that he made during my childhood hanging on the walls of this esteemed venue. You can see joy and gusto expressed in the bold carving of mahogany as he forges ahead on a new path, secure in the knowledge that his ancestors also relished the sound of mallet on chisel, making the wood chips fly. Maui Snares the Sun, which was a particular favourite of mine as a child, sits alongside Tinirau Ngā Tamariki a Tangaroa and Whiti Te Rā an oil stick drawing that celebrates Te Rauparaha’s famous haka with great exuberance.
Speaking of Whiti Te Ra, Fred has produced work in a range of media including painting and drawing, and also writes poetry. How do these different modes inform each other?
Like his peers Para Matchitt and Ralph Hōtere, his creativity was not restricted to one medium. Similarly, to become the Tōhunga or master of a meeting house in the past, many skills had to be acquired. It also reflects their background as educators and art specialists going through the Tovey scheme. As art teachers they were expected to pass on a variety of visual arts disciplines to the children, teaching them how to make lino cuts one day and carve soap the next.
Why do you think Fred returns frequently to birds in his sculptures and drawings?
Aotearoa is an island of birds. The only other animals that existed here prior to humans were bats and rats. Dogs were introduced by the Polynesian seafarers. So it is no surprise that Māori look upon birds with a sense of wonder and attribute human characteristics to them:
Koekoe te tūī, ketekete te kākā, kūkū te kererū.
Ngati Whātua chiefs were described as Black Hawkes. Our own tribe of Ngāti Koroki Kahukura is named after a tūpuna, himself named after an incident where a bird was entrapped. Wherever you go in Aotearoa birds hold a particular fascination for Māori. In my father’s work, they often describe the human condition: the nurturing of the fledgling, the glorious isolation and freedom of a hawk as it soars over the land, or his many portrayals of our whānau as kererū.
Ko au te moemoeaa
Ko au te moemoeaa
E rere raa taku manu
Te manu Te Wero
E rere raa
Ko au te moemoeaa
O te iwi te tawhiti
O taaku rere
Kia rite tonu
Ki te hoohonu me te maarama
O aa koutou whakariterite
No reira, e rere raa
Fred grew up in Horahora, a small village in the Waikato which was flooded in 1947 by the formation of Lake Karāpiro. What has Fred told you about his childhood in Horahora?
My father’s father, Kiwa Graham, spoke of Horahora often. By repeating his stories, he was ingraining them into us and ensuring that they wouldn’t be lost. Although he would laugh, his laughter veiled a deep pain at the loss of historic and sacred sites belonging to Ngāti Koroki Kahukura when the new power station of Karāpiro was created in 1947. Rachael Rakena and I made a work about this called Aniwaniwa, which was shown in the Venice Biennale in 2007. My father is now the oldest living member of Ngāti Koroki Kahukura. Despite his reticence, he remembers the people and faces such as Piupiu Te Wherowhero that have now gained legendary status at the Pā. His recent Waikato River Series is his homage to them.
Two of the works in Toi Whakaata / Reflections are from Ngaa Pou o Pootatau The Pillars of Pōtatau Series: Kia Mau and Washbowl of Sorrow. Fred produced this series of thirteen wall reliefs in 2004 to celebrate the Kīngitanga. Can you speak to the historical and political significance of these works?
This was an important series for my father, giving voice to the history of the King Movement and then to the history of the Waikato River. Queen Te Atairangikāhu was alive when the Kīngitanga series was produced and insisted that the tribe become the caretakers of the work. It’s amazing how many of my father’s works have been embraced by the tribe as a visual illustration of our history. Upcoming generations take these on as their inheritance.
Fred’s eight-meter relief sculpture Four Winds and Seven Seas, commissioned by the New Zealand Shipping Corporation in 1985, makes reference to Hokusai’s The Great Wave and Leonardo da Vinci’s A deluge. Can you talk about the imagery in this work?
My father is well read and likes to absorb the world into his art. So in portraying the seven seas for a shipping company commission, he ‘reverse appropriates’! Māori of course did not speak of the world’s oceans as being seven seas but of ‘ngā tai e wha’, the four coasts. So for the North Pacific he shapes his familiar koru forms into Hokusai’s Great Wave, and for the North Atlantic he turns to Leonardo’s deluge This is his nod of acknowledgement to the great cultures of the world. He himself did not travel overseas until 1978 when our family spent a year in Washington State, USA. My father was deeply fascinated by Northwest native carving, and this stimulated his interest in learning more about the indigenous peoples of North America and how they had endured a similar subjugation to Māori.
Fred has numerous public works in prominent sites in Tāmaki Makaurau, including Kaitiaki on Pukekawa / Auckland Domain and Te Waka Taumata o Horotiu and Kaitiaki II on Queen Street. Scale is a distinguishing feature of these works, what other significance do you see in Fred’s sculptures being situated in public spaces?
Now when briefs go out for public sculptures in New Zealand there is often a requirement to consider the history of the site and the local iwi. This was never the case when most of his works were made. Māori contemporary artists made visible an indigenous landscape that was buried under layers of colonial infrastructure and buildings, and seldom acknowledged. For all of his works this is the first port of call, acknowledging this depth of history. This is his legacy.
It certainly is a remarkable legacy. Ngā mihi nui Brett.