For three decades Nephi Tupaea’s art practice has explored what it means to take up space and have agency – over her body, her identity, her stories. As a long-standing member of activist art collectives Pacific Sisters and the SaVĀge K’lub, Tupaea (Ngāti Koata, Ngāti Tiipa, Ngāti Koroki Kahukura, Ngāti Kahungunu) has shown mostly textiles or performance works in national and international galleries since the ’90s. The combined works of these two collectives often highlight untold indigenous and queer stories and experiences, bringing them to light in formal gallery spaces. Now, Tupaea continues that tradition in her painting practice.
Tupaea often appropriates iconic post-impressionist works, imbuing them with stories and people from her whakapapa. Her mangopare koru forms collide with pointillism in a vibrant clash of technicolour space and texture, bringing these traditional indigenous patterns firmly into contemporary conversation, while also placing her work firmly within the canon of European art history.
Her latest body of work, Te Tangata, reimagines the works of Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh and Jean-Francois Millet to depict the urban drift of Māori communities after the world wars. Post-impressionist and realist paintings of indigenous workers now speak to the movements of working-class Māori who left their kaīnga and communities in search of a better life in New Zealand’s towns and cities.
These eight works explore the discrimination, racism, and prejudice which both led to and followed that urban drift, and which Tupaea witnessed throughout her childhood. They gently examine and unpick the ongoing effects of colonisation on her tīpuna, her parents, and her whānau. They starkly tell our collective history, through Tupaea’s personal history.
Before the Rapture presents a bucolic landscape, replete with horses, a reference to the loss of land and resources Tuapea’s whānau experienced after the world wars. Even today, no-one in the family knows what happened to their horses, though it’s suspected they were sold to pay bills, along with many of their other taonga.
Her version of Millet’s The Gleaners, called Follow where the work lies, shows her whānau working the Pukekohe potato fields in the early-20th Century. Both Tupaea’s mother and grandmother worked in Pukekohe, a town which was racially segregated at the time, as shown in the 2022 TVNZ documentary No Māori Allowed. Its producer, Reikura Kahi, told Radio NZ that Māori couldn’t access good healthcare, weren’t allowed haircuts, were only allowed in certain parts of the cinema and at the pool on certain days, had segregated schooling, and weren’t allowed to do their shopping without a Pākehā person making the purchase for them. The imagery in The Gleaners may seem like ancient history, but in Tupaea’s hands, we’re reminded that this history is alive.
Meanwhile, an appropriation of Van Gogh’s The Shearers expresses the seasonal nature of the work her parents undertook later, in Te Matau-a-Māui Hawke’s Bay. Like many Māori, they followed work from month to month – from freezing works to orchards to shearing sheds as the need arose.
These stories aren’t just facts for the history books. For Tupaea they’re also deeply personal. Much like the artworks of her European forebears, Tupaea’s paintings are bold, figurative, and captivating. But by cloaking her figures in traditional kōwhaiwhai patterns, Tupaea reclaims their stories and proclaims their mana motuhake.
— essay by Rosie Dawson-Hughes
