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Georgina Watson

Toi Koru by Sandy Adsett



Dr Sandy Adsett was born in 1939 on the family farm in Raupunga, a small Kahungunu (Ngāti Pahauwera) community just north of Wairoa. He has become known as a champion of Māori art and arts education, a master in the art of colour and what curator Reuben Friend calls ‘contemporary kōwhaiwhai’. Adsett co-founded Toihoukura School of Māori Art and Design in the mid 1990s alongside Sir Derek Lardelli and Steve Gibbs, and has worked on marae restoration projects in Wairoa and Tairāwhiti, as well as notably on the Rongomaraeroa Marae in Te Papa.


The touring exhibition ‘Toi Koru’ developed by Pataka and currently on display at the Tairāwhiti Museum brings together a significant body of work by Adsett spanning six decades of his career - from the late 1960’s to today. ‘Toi Koru’ presents a unique opportunity to view the breadth of Adsett’s formal and conceptual experiments in painting, traversing between popular cannons of western art history such as abstraction and cubism and customary and contemporary Toi Māori.


Throughout Adsett’s practice one thing that remains steadfast is his sophisticated ‘expansion on the principles of kōwhaiwhai’ as detailed in the exhibition wall text. Not only does the artist challenge older attitudes towards kōwhaiwhai as secondary to carving but he also contextualises kōwhaiwhai and its importance within contemporary Māori art. Adsett alongside a handful of his contemporaries paves the way for younger generations of Māori artists to work with the conceptual rigor and logic of kōwhaiwhai, as a visual language unique to Te Ao Māori.  


‘Toi Koru’ opens with three small works on board from 1969 titled ‘Tutu Tahi’, ‘Tutu Rua’ and ‘Tutu Toru’. Ironically, as Adsett recalls in an interview with Reuben Friend for Art News - when these paintings were first made and one was offered to the old Gisborne Museum for exhibition, the director positioned Adsett’s ‘Māori abstraction’ behind a doorway as it “clashed with the other works.” In these early works colourful amoebic forms swirl and unfurl across the three paintings. While these early works speak to the western abstraction and the experimentation into form and colour through application of paint, they also speak to Māori art and thought - and to the entanglements of creation, navigation and whakapapa within Te Ao Māori. 


In works such as ‘Arihia 1’ (1976) the fetal, hei tiki forms of ‘Tutu Tahi’, ‘Tutu Rua’ and ‘Tutu Toru’ germinate and sprout into koru and mangopare. In ‘Tukotahi’ (1987) the bulbous and embryonic forms of koru - like growing kumara - are reminiscent of some of the first preserved examples of kōwhaiwhai painted on hoe waka which propelled Māori navigators across the pacific to these lands some 500 years before europeans. Steve Gibbs has written extensively on this history of kōwhaiwhai, looking at the drawings of waka hoe by Sydney Parkinson, the artist on James Cook’s ship, of the hoe waka that were exchanged with Tupaia and Cook by Māori in 1769.


In Adsett’s later series ‘Te Template’ (2011) thick border lines of black, red and white paint pour into carved out koru, these sharp forms can't help but also speak to the art of whakairo and of Adsett’s formal training under renowned tohunga whakairo Pine Taiapa. 


Throughout ‘Toi Koru’ the principles of kōwhaiwhai pervade, not only in traditional forms seen adorning the tāhuhu of marae, but also in the traditions of Māori thought; the conceptual and philosophical realms in which positive and negative space work to co create the configurations of kōwhaiwhai -  reminding of the Māori creation story and the fertile darkness of Rangi and Papa pressed together, where their children were born and their necessary separation to create Te Ao Marama. 


Throughout the works in the exhibition lines strike through dark borders and pierce the interiors of paintings, rupturing and shattering contained space, likewise koru wriggle free and push their heads out of the prescribed confines of the canvas. Like aho tapu  - the sacred thread - the first and most important line of a weaving pattern, Adsett’s work is generative, the S shape of the manawa line - the central line in kōwhaiwhai - occurs repeatedly in ‘Toi Koru’ at different scales and formations giving way to the proliferating koru that sprout and grow from this central line birthing and protecting the young.


Toi Koru runs until August 4th 2024 at Tairāwhiti Museum.

Be sure to check it out!


Story by Georgina Watson

Image supplied


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