Te Whare Tangata: the eternally generative space through which everything is born, the sacred womb known as ‘the house of humanity’. This ennobled title we bestow upon wāhine, an eminence harnessed across Kāi Tahu and Sāmoan multimedia artist Lonnie Hutchinson’s vast corpus of work, including her recent exhibition at Milford Galleries Dunedin, From Me To You. With metal as her means, Hutchinson immortalises the innate strength and mana of wāhine, offering a deeply telling critique of our colonial reality. Powerfully subversive in its metallic aesthetic, the work interrupts the ‘colonial now’ through what I describe as ‘Curves of Steal’: effortlessly coupling medium and message to speak into the unsettling politics of gender and land dispossession.
Hutchinson’s oeuvre is an exaltation of mana wāhine: “In creating these works I am celebrating women’s craft practices like weaving and embroidery,” she says. Using her staple material—black building paper—as the elemental form from which her pieces arise, and with Papatūānuku as muse, she develops patterned motifs inspired by the whenua and her abundant flora and fauna, such as kōwhaiwhai— painted scroll ornamentation—and nihotaniwha—saw-edged pattern of interlocking triangles; the teeth of taniwha. The geometric design is etched first onto the building paper before being projected upon aluminium or stainless steel, then laser cut to reveal its final metallic form.
And here we see subversion in medium: the ostensible masculinity of shape—in steel and metal— is made possible only through the antecedent, generative creativity of wāhine—through papyrus. Only through wāhine can tāne exist, thus the ennoblement, Te Whare Tāngata. Niho (2023) exemplifies this. Fabricated of marine-grade steel into a large disc, Niho is sculpted into a geometric, symmetrical form, fusing curvaceous kōwhaiwhai with the sharp bite of nihotaniwha. For Hutchinson, the piece evokes “being eager, taking up the challenge and getting your teeth into it,” conveying the ancestral fortitude of purpose and determination that drove the hearts and minds of our tūpuna, whether across the great ocean Te Moa-na-nui-a-Kiwa, or in leading hīkoi and protests against the relentless confiscation of whenua Māori. With rounded fronds juxtaposed against the linearity of interlocking triangles, Niho reveals the interplay of masculine and feminine forms, both of which are harnessed as we rise to the challenges of our time. But with the kōwhaiwhai innermost on the steel plate, Hutchinson reminds the viewer of the perennial centrality of Te Whare Tāngata: in vivid defiance of colonial-patriarchal politics, she centres the sacred womb from which everything is given life.
The importance of mana wāhine to Hutchinson’s own Kāi Tahu whakapapa is captured in Tōnga o te Rā (2015), a tall, rectangular sculpture composed of black tar paper with steel pins and metal eyelets. Tōnga o te Rā is a magnetic celebration of the great ancestress Tūhaitara, a pre-eminent tūpuna wahine whose strength and courage are, like pounamu, an enduring feature of Kāi Tahu history, mana and origin stories. Tōnga o te Rā references the ‘outlook toward the south’, committing to artistic memory Tūhaitara’s southern epic across the whenua. Her valour and daring are likewise captured in Hutchinson’s earlier exhibition, The Ballad of Tūhaitara, shown at Jonathan Smart Gallery in 2015, which included a series of three asymmetrical panels, composed of charcoal building paper and etched with koru-like fronds and kōwhaiwhai patterning. Reminiscent of arero— tongues—these works also commemorate the role of oral histories for Māori today, a body of knowledge Hutchinson herself adds to with artful dexterity, interrupting the colonial moment and, with titanium determination, surfacing the mana of wāhine then and now.
Awhi (2022) extends Hutchinson’s critique of colonialism from gender to the dispossession of Māori land. Composed of powder-coated aluminium with a buttercup-yellow finish, Awhi takes the shape of a concertinaed quilted blanket with a fringed edge. Continuing with kōwhaiwhai as its motif, the piece adopts a method of repetitious mirroring across the twelve symmetrical strips of the blanket. Deceptively alluring through the vivacity of colour, Awhi surfaces the original sin of ‘inequitable disproportionality’: trading items of little comparable value, such as blankets, in payment for large tracts of whenua, resulting in the dispossession of tangata from whenua. “Give us a couple of blankets for the land!” quips Hutchinson. But long after those blankets have turned to dust, Awhi’s aluminium body will live on, and thus both medium and message will endure in the memory of mokopuna to come.
Thus, ‘Curves of Steal’: at once reclaiming the mana and power of wāhine from the objectifying, patriarchal gaze, and vocalising the theft inherent in the exploitative mechanics of colonisation, all through the medium of steel. And, indeed, such an enterprise requires nerves of steel from the outset! For both tinana—body—and whenua, ‘Curves of Steal’ speaks to the cleverly subversive narrative embedded across Hutchinson’s metallic masterpieces, in interrupting the colonial now. For the medium really is the message and, long after the sun has set and the last word been spoken, her alloy sculptures will endure in steely resolve to forever tell their story.
