The Bible and Art, Perspectives from Oceania (The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies) 9780567673299, 9780567673305, 0567673294

Citation preview

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Scriptural Traces: Critical Perspectives on the Reception and Influence of The Bible 11 Editors Claudia V. Camp, Texas Christian University Matthew A. Collins, University of Chester, UK Andrew Mein, Westcott House, Cambridge Editorial board Michael J. Gilmour, David Gunn, James Harding, Jorunn Økland Published under LIBRARY OF HEBREW BIBLE/​OLD TESTAMENT STUDIES 656 Formerly Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series Editors Claudia V. Camp, Texas Christian University Andrew Mein, Westcott House, Cambridge Founding Editors David J. A. Clines, Philip R. Davies and David M. Gunn Carolyn J. Sharp, James W. Watts Editorial Board Alan Cooper, John Goldingay, Robert P. Gordon, Norman K. Gottwald, James Harding, John Jarick, Carol Meyers, Carolyn J. Sharp Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Daniel L. Smith-​Christopher, James W. Watts

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The Bible and Art, Perspectives from Oceania Edited by Caroline Blyth and Nāsili Vaka’uta

Bloomsbury T&T Clark An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury T&T Clark An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as T&T Clark 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Caroline Blyth and Na¯sili Vaka’uta, 2017 Caroline Blyth and Na¯sili Vaka’uta have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-​0 -​5 676-​7329-​9    ePDF: 978-​0 -​5 676-​7330-​5 Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Series: Library of Hebrew Bible/​Old Testament Studies, volume 656, Scriptural Traces, volume 11 Cover image: Te Timatanga © Tony Brooking Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

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Contents List of Figures

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List of Contributors

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List of Abbreviations

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Introduction  Caroline Blyth and Nāsili Vaka’uta

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1 Analogies with Anathoth: Reading Land, Reading Jeremiah in the Paintings of Michael Shepherd  Emily Colgan

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2 Darryn George: The Meeting of Modernism and Māori Tradition  Robin Woodward

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3 The Absurdly Ideal Jesus of Reg Mombassa  Roland Boer

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4 Architectural Expression of the Body of Christ  Murray Rae

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5 Art as Method: Visualizing Interpretation through Tongan Ngatu  Nāsili Vaka’uta

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6 Sister Gael O’Leary: A Road Less Travelled  Robin Woodward

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7 Exploring Visual Exegesis: A Conversation between Artist and Beholders  Caroline Blyth and Alex Farrell, with Tony Brooking

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8 Michael Riley’s Bible and the Touch of the Text (With Reference to the Gospel of Luke)  Anne Elvey

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9 Tatauing Cain: Reading the Sign on Cain from the Ground  Jione Havea

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10 Terry Stringer: From Scripture to Sculpture  Robin Woodward

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11 Berēšît: Countersigning Maria O’Connor’s Equus’ Ashes with Derrida’s L’animal  Yael Klangwisan

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12 Of Birth and Death: Hearing and Seeing Then and Now  Elaine M. Wainwright

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13 Is This the Place? The Promised Land in Colin McCahon’s Paintings  Judith Brown

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14 ‘The Painting Is Suffering’: Māori and Pasefika Boys Respond to Images of Christ and Peter  Jacky Sewell

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Biblical Reference Index

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Author Index

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Figures 1.1–​ 1.3, 1.5, 1.6  Michael Shepherd, untitled paintings from the Anathoth series, 2011–​13, acrylic on board, 350 x 600  mm. Images courtesy of the artist and Whitespace gallery, Auckland 1.4 Michael Shepherd, ‘Tel’, from the Anathoth series, 2011–​13, acrylic on board, 350 x 600 mm. Images courtesy of the artist and Whitespace gallery, Auckland 2.1 Darryn George, This Generation, 1999, oil on canvas, 1,650 x 3,300  mm. Private collection. Photograph courtesy of Darryn George 2.2 Darryn George, Sometime after Manet, 1998, oil on canvas, 1,650 x 3,300  mm. Private collection. Photograph courtesy of Darryn George 2.3 Darryn George Sometime after Manet (detail), 1998, oil on canvas, 1,650 x 3,300 mm. Private collection. Photograph courtesy of Darryn George 2.4 Darryn George, Ihaia, 2003, oil on canvas, 405 x 405 mm. Real Art Roadshow collection. Photograph courtesy of Darryn George 2.5 Darryn George, Kupu Tuturu, 1994, oil on wood, 600 x 520 mm. University of Canterbury collection. Photograph courtesy of Darryn George 2.6 Darryn George, Takuta #6, 2012, oil on canvas, 1,950 x 1,950  mm. Private collection. Photograph courtesy of Darryn George 2.7 Darryn George, Takuta #6 (detail), 2012, oil on canvas, 1,950 x 1,950  mm. Private collection. Photograph courtesy of Darryn George 2.8 Darryn George, Rata Wallwork, 2012, acrylic on MDF, 7 x 10 m. Tauranga Art Gallery Toi Tauranga. Photograph courtesy of Darryn George 2.9 Darryn George, Atua #4, 2011–​ 12, oil on canvas, 1,500 x 2,130  mm. Wellington, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa Collection. Photograph courtesy of Darryn George

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2.10  Darryn George, Pulse, 2008, acrylic on MDF, installation, approximately 300 sq. m. Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetu. Photograph by Brendan Lee 2.11 Darryn George, Pulse, 2008, acrylic on MDF, installation, approximately 300 sq. m. Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetu. Photograph by Brendan Lee 2.12 Darryn George, Pulse (detail –​central pillar), 2008, acrylic on MDF, installation, approximately 300 sq. m.  Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetu. Photograph by Brendan Lee 2.13 Darryn George, The Equaliser, 2006–​2007, oil on canvas, 10 panels 1,200 x 800  mm each. Artist’s collection. Photograph courtesy of Darryn George 2.14 Darryn George, The Lamb’s Book of Life (Folder Wall), 2010–​11, fabric on stainless steel wire, installation, 29 x 29 m. Christchurch City Council. Photograph courtesy of Darryn George 2.15 Darryn George, Folder Room, 2013, automotive paint on MDF, and lighting equipment, approximately 80 sq. m. Venice, Palazzo Bembo. Photograph courtesy of Darryn George 2.16 Darryn George, Rarohiko #10, 2010, oil on canvas, 1,500 x 2,130  mm. Courtesy of Gow Langsford Gallery. Photograph courtesy of Darryn George 2.17 Darryn George, Countdown, 2010, oil on canvas, 11 panels each 350 x 270 mm. Courtesy of Gow Langsford Gallery. Photograph courtesy of Darryn George 4.1 The meeting house, Ōhope marae. Photographer Murray Rae 4.2 The parata, Ōhope marae. Photographer Murray Rae 4.3 Meeting house interior, Ōhope marae. Photographer Murray Rae 4.4 Tukutuku panels, Ōhope marae. Photographer Murray Rae 4.5 Futuna Chapel exterior. Image used with permission of Victoria University Press 4.6 Preliminary design ideas for Futuna Chapel. Used with permission of Jacob Scott 4.7 Crucifix, Futuna Chapel. Image used with permission of Victoria University Press 4.8 Futuna Chapel interior. Image used with permission of Victoria University Press

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5.1 Tongan ngatu. Photo taken at Methodist Church of New Zealand Conference, Hamilton, 2014. Photographer Peter van Hout. Used with author’s permission 5.2 The manulua pattern painted on a ngatu. Photographer Nāsili Vaka’uta 5.3 Ngatu-​inspired framework and interpretive markers 6.1 Gael O’Leary with her bronze sculpture Come Sit Awhile, 2013–​ 14, bronze, 1,500 x 800 x 700  mm. Institute of the Sisters of Mercy of Australia and Papua New Guinea, Stanmore, Sydney 6.2 Gael O’Leary, Woman Damned, detail, 1991, acrylic on canvas, 1.2 x 1 m. Artist’s private collection 6.3 Gael O’Leary, Mercy Bronze, detail, 1992, bronze, 3,000 x 1,500 x 120 mm. Mater Misericordiae Private Hospital, Brisbane 6.4 Gael O’Leary, Aroha, 2000, bronze, 2.6 x 1.4 x 1.2 m. Auckland 6.5 Gael O’Leary, Meetings, 1989, oil on canvas, 760 x 1,020  mm. Private collection 6.6 Gael O’Leary, Mentor, 2004, bronze, 1,176 x 880 x 750  mm. Mercy High School, Baltimore 6.7 Gael O’Leary, Good Samaritan, 2013–​14, bronze bas relief, 1,550 x 650 x 100 mm. Mercy Ministry Offices, Lewisham, Victoria 6.8 Gael O’Leary, Visitation, 2006, bronze relief, 800 x 560 x 180 mm. Emmaus Residential Care, Banyo, Queensland 6.9 Gael O’Leary, Return of the Prodigal, 2006, bronze relief, 800 x 400 x 180 mm. Emmaus Residential Care, Banyo, Queensland 6.10 Gael O’Leary, concept drawing for The Song of Miriam, 2014, watercolour. Artist’s private collection 6.11 Gael O’Leary, concept drawing for The Traveller, 2016, watercolour. Artist’s private collection 7.1 Tony Brooking, Te Timatanga, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 380 x 760 mm. Private collection. Photographer Tim Page 7.2 The mangōpare, representing the hammerhead shark, with pūngāwerewere weaving around them; detail from Tony Brooking’s Te Timatanga. Photographer Tim Page 7.3 The white manaia representing God, surrounded by pūhoro; detail from Tony Brooking’s Te Timatanga. Photographer Tim Page 7.4 The black manaia representing male and female in humanity; detail from Tony Brooking’s Te Timatanga. Photographer Tim Page

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7.5 Artist Tony Brooking with his painting Te Timatanga. Photographer Tim Page 8.1 Michael Riley, Untitled [bible] from the cloud series, 2000, printed 2005, chromogenic pigment print, 110 x 155  cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Copyright © Michael Riley Foundation/​Licensed by Viscopy, 2016 9.1 Manulua pattern. 10.1 Terry Stringer. Photographer Simon Devitt 10.2 and 10.3  Terry Stringer, Angel Triptych, 1976, relief, oil on plywood, 240 x 360 mm. Private collection. Photograph courtesy of Studio La Gonda 10.4  Terry Stringer, Susanna and the Elders, 1998, polychromed bronze, 540  mm. Private collection. Photograph courtesy of Studio La Gonda 10.5, 10.6 and 10.7  Terry Stringer, Annunciation Lamp, 1996, polychromed bronze, 1.75 m. Private collection. Photograph courtesy of Studio La Gonda 10.8 and 10.9  Terry Stringer, Mother and Child with Three Instruments of the Passion, 2001, bronze, 590 mm. Private collection. Photograph courtesy of Studio La Gonda 10.10 Terry Stringer, The Baptism of Christ, 2000, bronze, 1.2 m. Zealandia, Mahurangi West. Photographer Gil Hanly 10.11 Terry Stringer, Private View, 2003, bronze, 1,080  mm. Zealandia, Mahurangi West. Photograph courtesy of Studio La Gonda 10.12 Terry Stringer, Zealandia Calvary, 2006–​2008, bronze, varying heights 250–​ 60  mm on 1,270  mm poles. Zealandia, Mahurangi West. Photographer Simon Devitt 10.13 Terry Stringer, Risen Christ, 2000, bronze, 2.4 m.  Cathedral Square, Christchurch. Photographer Simon Devitt 11.1 and 11.2  Still from Maria O’Connor’s film Equus’ Ashes, 2014; also exhibited as a film installation Ecce Equus at St Paul St Gallery, Auckland 12.1 George Mung Mung, Mary of Warmun, 1983, carved wood. © George Mung Mung/​Licensed by Viscopy, 2016

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12.2 Arthur Boyd, Crucifixion, Shoalhaven, 1979–​80, oil on canvas, Bundanon Trust Collection. Reproduced with permission of Bundanon Trust 13.1 Colin McCahon, Takaka:  Night and Day, 1948, oil on canvas, 915 x 2,130 mm. Reproduced with permission from the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust 13.2 Colin McCahon, The Promised Land, 1948, oil on canvas, 920 x 1,370. Reproduced with permission from the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust 14.1 Frank Wesley, Peter’s Denial, c.  1970, oil and turpentine with gold leaf on canvas, 910 x 610  mm. Used with permission of Athalie Wesley 14.2 Gustave van de Woestyne, Christ in the Desert, 1939, oil on panel, 1,225 x 1,690 mm. Licensed by Lukas –​Art in Flanders 14.3 Andrei Rublev, The Saviour, c. 1410 (also known as Christ the Redeemer), tempera on wood, 1,580 x 1,060  mm. Available online: https://​commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:Rublev%27s_​ saviour.jpg?uselang=en-​gb

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Contributors Caroline Blyth is lecturer in biblical studies and religious studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her research focuses on rape culture and religion, feminist and queer readings of the Bible, and religion in popular culture. Her publications include The Narrative of Rape in Genesis 34:  Interpreting Dinah’s Silence (2010) and Sexuality, Ideology and the Bible:  Antipodean Engagements (co-​edited with Robert Myles, 2015). She is current managing co-​editor of the Bible and Critical Theory journal. Roland Boer is research professor at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and professor of literary theory at Renmin University of China, Beijing. His main area of research concerns the many dimensions of Marxism and religion, for which he has published numerous books and articles. The most recent are The Sacred Economy of Ancient Israel (2015), Idols of Nations (2014) and In the Vale of Tears (2014). Judith Brown is a lay minister in the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand. She has worked as a lecturer in theology at Laidlaw College and St. John the Evangelist College, both in Auckland. Her main research areas are theology and the arts and the work of Ernst Bloch. Emily Colgan has a PhD in Hebrew Bible from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is currently lecturer in theological studies at Trinity Methodist Theological College in Auckland. Her main fields of research include work on ecological biblical interpretation and gender violence and religion. Anne Elvey is a researcher, writer and editor. She is an adjunct research fellow at Monash University and an honorary research associate of Trinity College Theological School, University of Divinity, Melbourne. Her recent publications include Climate Change Cultural Change:  Religious Responses and Responsibilities (2013, co-​edited with David Gormley O’Brien), Reinterpreting

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the Eucharist: Explorations in Feminist Theology and Ethics (2013, co-​edited with Carol Hogan, Kim Power and Claire Renkin) and The Matter of the Text: Material Engagements between Luke and the Five Senses (2011). She is editor of Colloquium: The Australian and New Zealand Theological Review. Alex Farrell graduated with a master of letters from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. His current research interests include paradigm shifts in art and theology and exploring the role of artistic depictions of the infinite in imagining and facilitating religious experience. Jione Havea is a native Methodist pastor from Tonga who is primary researcher at the Public and Contextual Theology Research Centre, Charles Sturt University, Australia, and visiting scholar at Trinity Methodist Theological College in Auckland, Aotearoa/​New Zealand. He is the author of Elusions of Control: Biblical Law on the Words of Women (2003) and co-​editor of, among others, Out of Place:  Doing Theology on the Crosscultural Brink (2014) and Islands, Islanders, and the Bible: RumInations (2015). Yael Klangwisan lectures in the Laidlaw Graduate School in Auckland, New Zealand. Most recently she is the author of two books on the Song of Songs: Earthing the Cosmic Queen (2014) and Jouissance (2015). Her research draws biblical literature into discourse with French literary theory, and her current project explores the engagement of philosophers Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous with biblical literature on the question of the animal. Murray Rae is professor of theology at the University of Otago where he teaches courses in systematic theology and ethics. His research interests include the work of Søren Kierkegaard, theological hermeneutics, Māori engagements with Christianity, and theology and architecture. He edits the Journal of Theological Interpretation monograph series and his publications include Mana Maori and Christianity (2012), Kierkegaard and Theology (2010), History and Hermeneutics (2005) and Kierkegaard’s Vision of the Incarnation (1997).

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Jacky Sewell works as the West England Ministry Training Course tutor for Ripon College, Cuddesdon, Oxford and School of Ministry Support Officer for the Diocese of Hereford in the United Kingdom. She has a PhD in spirituality and visual art from the University of Otago and is currently writing in the areas of pastoral theology, art and spirituality, and spiritual formation. Nāsili Vaka’uta is a Tongan native and ordained Methodist minister. He is the current principal of, and Ranston lecturer in biblical studies, at Trinity Theological College, Auckland. He is the author of Reading Ezra 9–​10 Tu’a-​ wise:  Rethinking Biblical Interpretation in Oceania (2011) and editor of Talanoa Rhythms: Voices from Oceania (2011) and has published several articles in peer-​reviewed journals and book chapters for volumes such as Bible, Borders, Belonging:  Engaging Readings from Oceania (2014) and Islands, Islanders, and the Bible: Ruminations (2015). Elaine M. Wainwright is professor emeritus of the University of Auckland. A New Testament scholar, she combines feminist, postcolonial and ecological hermeneutics in her engagement with the biblical text. Her most recent publication is the Earth Bible Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew (2016). Robin Woodward is a senior lecturer in art history at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is a specialist in New Zealand art, with particular expertise in contemporary painting, sculpture and public art. She has written monographs and thematic texts on aspects of modern and contemporary painting as well as sculpture.

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Abbreviations Walter Bauer, A Greek-​English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. Translated, revised and augmented by William F. Arndt, F. Wilbur Gingrich and Frederick W. Danker. 2nd edn. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979. De an. Aristotle, De Anima Gen. R. Genesis Rabbah JBL Journal of Biblical Literature JPS Jewish Publication Society KJV King James Version NAB New American Bible NIDOTTE  New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis, edited by Willem A. VanGemeren. Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1996. 5 vols. NIV New International Version NRSV New Revised Standard Version RSV Revised Standard Version SBL Society of Biblical Literature BAGD

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Introduction Caroline Blyth and Nāsili Vaka’uta

The Bible is a distinctly visual book, its words evoking a myriad images of people, places and events which ignite our visual imagination like fireworks as we journey through its pages. Even the more abstract ancient theologies articulated within its pages are often wrapped up and presented to the audience in bright visual forms –​the verdant garden and lush fruits of Eden (Genesis 2–​3), the glittering golden calf of idolatry (Exodus 32), the larger-​than-​life figure of Woman Wisdom (Proverbs 1–​9) and the stunning cosmic vistas of creation, which God rolls out like a magic carpet in response to the theodicy of Job’s laments (Job 38–​41). It is perhaps little wonder, then, that the biblical traditions have, over the centuries, inspired the imagination of countless artists, architects and artisans who have worked to capture these traditions –​their stories, themes and theologies –​within visual media such as paintings, sculptures, film, body art and architecture. Such visual re-​presentations of the written word are neither neutral nor objective, but are invariably shaped by artists’ own interpretations of the texts. And, like all biblical readers, the artist-​as-​reader’s interpretations will be influenced by their cultural, historical, ideological and geographical locations, which act as interpretive ‘lenses’ through which they make sense of the biblical traditions. As Mieke Bal has noted, ‘Interpretation is necessarily a reader’s response brought to a text; it is, at most, an interaction, at least, a purely subjective act . . . Interpretation is never objective, never reliable, never free of biases and subjectivity.’1 Indeed, such biases and subjectivities guide both the act of reading and the artist’s subsequent attempts to articulate this reading in visual form. The costumes worn by figures in a painting, the materials

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sourced for a sculpture or carving, the colours used to decorate a building’s interior –​factors such as these emerge from the creator’s spatial, temporal and cultural milieus within which their act of biblical interpretation has occurred. By studying these visual artefacts in depth, we can thus trace the contextualized nature of the artist’s interpretive process, looking to see how biblical text and contemporary context collide in a creative and often colourful encounter. This relationship that exists between biblical text, artistic interpretation and cultural location does, however, operate in more than one direction. While a biblical text may direct (to some degree at least) the content or subject matter of an art work, and while culture and context will impact the artist’s presentation of this text in visual form, the art work produced can, in turn, invite its viewers to reconsider the biblical text with fresh eyes. As J. Cheryl Exum and Ela Nutu note, a dialogue exists between biblical texts and biblical art, in which ‘each plays a critical role in the process of interpreting the other’.2 In other words, our knowledge of a biblical tradition will impact our understanding of an art work that alludes to that tradition; additionally though, our viewing of this art work will also draw us back to the biblical tradition in question, summoning us to think about it with new insight and imagination. Artists weave together text and image in complex and often surprising ways; and by so doing, their artistic representations of biblical traditions become rich and varied media of biblical interpretation –​visual interpretation –​which can serve as valuable tools to guide the viewers’ exegetical voyage. This relatively new approach to biblical interpretation has, over the past decade, shown promising signs of growth in popularity, and there is a slowly developing recognition of the value of the visual arts within the wider academy of biblical scholarship, particularly within the sub-​discipline of biblical reception studies.3 Our aim for this volume, therefore, is to join in this enriching exploration of the Bible in/​and art, using as a focus our own geographical location in Oceania. Many recent studies of the Bible in art have concentrated on northern hemisphere art and artists; to date, there has been little engagement with this subject from a specifically Oceanic perspective. This volume will begin redressing this imbalance, as its contributors invite you to consider artistic presentations of biblical stories, themes and theologies that have been created in the cultural locations of Aotearoa New Zealand,4 Australia and the Islands of Oceania. With their distinctive

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southern hemisphere perspectives, the chapters explore the ways in which artists, working in a broad array of styles, traditions and media, are guided by their own rich Oceanic contexts and cultures to engage with the written texts of the Bible. A number of themes weave their way throughout the book, including antipodean landscapes and ecology, (post)colonialism, philosophy, Oceanic spiritualties and the often contested engagements between Western and indigenous cultures. Within this weaving process, each chapter also invites the reader to journey to the southern hemisphere, to view these art works through Oceanic eyes and to contemplate how their own locations will impact their understanding of these antipodean visualizations of the biblical traditions. To begin this journey, Emily Colgan calls readers to contemplate the layers of intertextuality that can exist between the written text and the visual image, as she explores the work of contemporary New Zealand artist Michael Shepherd. Using Ziva Ben-​Porat’s theory of literary allusion, she traces Shepherd’s intertextual allusions to the book of Jeremiah in his series of paintings titled Anathoth (2011–​13). Colgan attends in particular to one image from this series, identifying its various allusions to Jer. 6.1–​8, where the prophet conjures up images of violence that will be perpetrated against the land of Jerusalem. By drawing attention to Shepherd’s allusions to this text, she illuminates the artist’s engagement with New Zealand’s environmental history and his awareness of the ecological crisis that currently grips this land. Through this intertextual encounter between biblical word and contemporary image, Colgan demonstrates that Shepherd, like Jeremiah, evokes a message to his audience that is urgent and devastating, but one that also allows room for just a little hope. In Chapter  2, Robin Woodward introduces another New Zealand artist, Darryn George, whose work calls biblical texts and theologies into dialogue with the visual image. Drawing on his Christian faith and Māori heritage, George creates Modernist abstract works that evoke a powerful sense of the sublime, or sacred. Yet, as Woodward notes, George’s art is also deeply rooted in the human condition and human experience. A number of his art works speak directly about crises that have affected human and environmental communities in Aotearoa New Zealand, most notably the Christchurch earthquakes in 2010 and 2011. Through his bold colour work and his melding

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together of text and image, his paintings and installations become media that can speak to local and international audiences about the human experiences of faith, life, trauma and healing. Leaping across the Tasman in Chapter  3, Roland Boer introduces us to Australia-​based artist Reg Mombassa, whose work weaves together the iconographies of the New Testament traditions and Australian culture. Drawing on Theodor Adorno’s theory of negative dialectics, Boer interrogates Mombassa’s numerous artistic images of ‘Australian Jesus’, which the artist uses to evoke the myth of the white, masculine ‘Australian psyche’. Yet this evocation, argues Boer, is steeped in the macabre, casting up anxieties about Australia’s political, cultural and environmental ills. Mombassa’s Jesus brings little or no comfort to the viewer –​no promises of quick and easy redemption. Rather, this figure reminds us that the well-​worn myths of a paradisiacal Australia cannot exist without the reality of hellish barbarism and exclusion that lie just below the surface of contemporary Australian life. In Chapter 4, we return to Aotearoa New Zealand, this time to contemplate the way that architectural design can be used to create sacred spaces in which people can gather, worship and contemplate the theologies of their religious community. Murray Rae takes us on a tour of two Christian buildings, whose design is rooted in a distinctively Māori architectural and theological imagination. Tracing their various structures and iconographies, he invites us to experience these buildings as evocations of the body of Christ as articulated in the New Testament Pauline epistles. In particular, Rae affirms the significance of these spaces within their Oceanic Christian context, demonstrating the power of architectural design to create sacred locations where people can gather to experience Christ’s presence as a community of faith. The significance of Oceanic art forms is taken up again in Chapter 5, where Nāsili Vaka’uta attempts to visualize the interpretive task through the hermeneutical lens of Tongan ngatu (decorated barkcloth or tapa). Discussing the production, design and cultural significance of ngatu in Tongan society, Vaka’uta constructs a ngatu-​inspired framework, which he employs in a reading of Gen. 1.1–​2.4a. He argues that Oceanic arts, while not depicting anything specifically biblical, can be used to draw a methodology for biblical interpretation, which enables indigenous scriptures to dialogue with biblical texts in an inter-​scriptural engagement.

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In Chapter  6, Robin Woodward relates the fascinating journey of New Zealand sculptor Gael O’Leary. A former Sister of Mercy, O’Leary spent much of her life maintaining a delicate balance between her work as an artist and her life in the Order. Yet, as Woodward illustrates, despite the difficulties and conflicts this raised, she never lost sight of her vocation –​to minister to others through her art. Looking in depth at a number of her sculptures, we learn more about this remarkable artist and discover the various ways that her Christian faith and engagement with the Bible both guided and inspired her creativity and calling. This focus on the artist as creator and interpreter of religious traditions is again taken up in Chapter 7, where Caroline Blyth and Alex Farrell walk us through the process of visual exegesis –​a methodological approach to reading the Bible that employs visual images and their creators as sources of biblical interpretation. Through their conversation with Māori artist Tony Brooking, they demonstrate the value of visual exegesis, using Brooking’s visual presentation of Genesis 1–2 in his painting Te Tīmatanga (The Beginning) as a medium through which to shed new light on the biblical text. What emerges from this conversation is a dialogue  –​between artist, art work, viewer and text –​in which all participants engage with each other to create a vibrant reading of the creation narrative that is profoundly embedded in the artist’s contemporary context of Aotearoa New Zealand. In Chapter 8, Anne Elvey draws into conversation the work of Australian Indigenous photographer and filmmaker Michael Riley, the Gospel of Luke and the theory of touch articulated by French philosopher Jean-​Luc Nancy. Elvey discusses Riley’s work in light of his exploration of Christianity’s colonial impact on Australian Indigenous people and the land, particularly in relation to the Bible as a material artefact of colonization. Bringing this art into dialogue with Nancy’s theory of touch, Elvey uncovers within Luke a trope of compassionate touch, which reveals in turn ‘unsettling patterns of violent relatedness’. Such a counter-​colonial reading, she argues, cannot shake off the colonial heritage of the biblical text, but it may offer a possibility of hope, enculturated by Indigenous people as an object that touches, and is touched by, their evolving cultural narratives. Chapter 9 takes the volume back to the islands as Jione Havea contemplates the art of Oceanic tātatau (tattooing). Tātatau is a form of Pasifika art that

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inscribes memories and customs on the bodies of native men and women. Havea notes that in many Pasifika islands, this rite suffered under two foreign forces: missionaries prohibiting the marking of bodies (supposed to be temples), and superstars commodifying body art. He proposes a tātatau reading of the sign of Cain (Gen. 4.15), treating tātatau as a scripturalizing rite that links to, changes (rewrites) and lets go of histories and traditions. Havea then uses this three-​way process to make sense of the sign of Cain as his protection, segregation and letting go. In Chapter  10, Robin Woodward considers one of New Zealand’s pre-​ eminent contemporary sculptors, Terry Stringer, investigating his engagement with the biblical traditions. By focusing on a number of Stringer’s biblically themed sculptures, Woodward explores his use of the Bible as a source of both figurative and symbolic inspiration, which enables him to analyse and experiment with three-​dimensional form. Drawing our attention to this sculptor’s use of diverse materials, forms, lighting and space, she guides us through the process by which his sculptures invite viewers’ engagement, thereby enabling new and inventive encounters of the biblical traditions. Moving from three-​dimensional sculpture to the two-​dimensionality of screen and canvas, Yael Klangwisan reflects in Chapter 11 on the creation narratives of Genesis 1–​3 in light of the film installation Equus Ashes by New Zealand artist Maria O’Connor. In her poetic essay, Klangwisan uses Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of human–​animal relations as a starting point to trace the evocation of humanimal in both the biblical tradition and Equus Ashes. Weaving Helene Cixous’s ‘poetic bestiary’ into this discussion, she calls attention to the animal and humanimal presences in Genesis 1–​3. By thus walking with Derrida and Cixous through a new reading of the text, Klangwisan offers us ‘a return to paradise, a new way to think’ about human–​animal encounters within the context of divine creation. In Chapter 12, Elaine Wainwright continues this focus on material bodies and extends it to embrace ecological concerns too, as she ponders the themes of birth and death bookending Matthew’s gospel. Utilizing a material ecocritical approach, she considers the ways that Australian artists George Mung Mung and Arthur Boyd weave together image and poetry to create intertextual responses to both the biblical traditions and contemporary environmental crises. Drawing the reader from image, to poetic word, to gospel narrative,

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Wainwright guides us along a seamless trajectory of interpretation that is ‘engaged by the senses’ and that sustains invaluable conversations about preserving the ‘material sacred’ in Oceania’s fragile ecosystems. Returning to the theme of (colonized) land in Chapter 13, Judith Brown brings into dialogue New Zealand artist Colin McCahon and the biblical trope of the Promised Land, as she considers his attempts to re-​vision this land in the context of European settlement. Through a close study of three of his paintings, Brown suggests that McCahon’s landscapes can be understood in light of the biblical theme of land as divine blessing. Particularly, within his emotive evocations of land, she explores the ways that the artist tries to bring to the settler consciousness a sense that the Promised Land of Aotearoa New Zealand could be a place of blessing, belonging and transformation. We end this volume with something a little different. In previous chapters, authors located in Oceania have engaged with Oceanic artists, searching for significances that works of art might hold within their home-​grown cultural location. This, however, might raise the question: does art only have significance within the context (historical, geographical, cultural) in which it is created? Will it only make sense to audiences who are likewise located within this same context? In other words, can Oceanic art only be viewed meaningfully through eyes that are in or from Oceania? And, conversely, will Oceanic audiences fail to find meaning in art that originates from other corners of the globe? In this final chapter, Jacky Sewell suggests that the answer to these questions is an unambiguous ‘no’. Reflecting on a research project that captured the aesthetic, theological and physical responses of young Pacific Islanders to biblically themed art, she affirms the potential for visual images to transcend cultural and geographical boundaries and to evoke deeply meaningful responses from viewers located within very different cultures and contexts. When we encounter a visual image, we bring our whole selves to that image –​our senses, beliefs, experiences and worldviews. We may recognize the familiar, or be taken aback by the unfamiliar, but this encounter will always be enlightening and transforming. For readers of this volume situated in Oceania, and those in other parts of the world, we hope you will find the chapters and their accompanying images likewise transforming, and a medium by which you can read the biblical traditions afresh through Oceanic eyes.

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Notes 1. Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 238. 2. J. Cheryl Exum and Ela Nutu, ‘Introduction’, in Between the Text and the Canvas: The Bible and Art in Dialogue, ed. J. Cheryl Exum and Ela Nutu, Bible in the Modern World 13 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009), 1. 3. A number of monographs and edited volumes have been published recently on the Bible in the visual arts, including Exum and Nutu, Between the Text and the Canvas; Martin O’Kane, Painting the Text: The Artist as Biblical Interpreter, Bible in the Modern World 8 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2007); Martin O’Kane (ed.), Bible, Art, Gallery, Bible in the Modern World 21 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011); John Harvey, The Bible as Visual Culture: When Text Becomes Image, Bible in the Modern World 57 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2013); Christine E. Joynes (ed.), Perspectives on the Passion: Encountering the Bible through the Arts (London: T&T Clark International, 2008); J. Cheryl Exum, Plotted, Shot, and Painted: Cultural Representations of Biblical Women, rev. edn (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2012); Katie B. Edwards, Admen and Eve: The Bible in Contemporary Advertising (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2012). 4. Aotearoa is the most widely used Māori name for New Zealand and often precedes its English counterpart when the country is written or spoken about. The precise origins and meaning of Aotearoa are uncertain, but it is often translated as ‘land of the long white cloud’. As Māori is an official language of New Zealand, Māori words will not be italicized throughout this volume. We have also not italicized Polynesian and indigenous Australian words; for the authors in this book and for many readers, these are not ‘foreign’ words.

Bibliography Bal, Mieke. Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 1990. Edwards, Katie B. Admen and Eve: The Bible in Contemporary Advertising. Bible in the Modern World 48. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2012. Exum, J. Cheryl. Plotted, Shot, and Painted: Cultural Representations of Biblical Women. Rev. edn. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2012. Exum, J. Cheryl, and Ela Nutu. ‘Introduction’. In Between the Text and the Canvas: The Bible and Art in Dialogue, edited by J. Cheryl Exum and Ela Nutu, 1–​10. Bible in the Modern World 13. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009.

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Harvey, John. The Bible as Visual Culture: When Text Becomes Image. Bible in the Modern World 57. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2013. Joynes, Christine E. (ed.). Perspectives on the Passion: Encountering the Bible through the Arts. London: T&T Clark International, 2008. O’Kane, Martin. Painting the Text: The Artist as Biblical Interpreter. Bible in the Modern World 8. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2007. O’Kane, Martin (ed.). Bible, Art, Gallery. Bible in the Modern World 21. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011.

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Analogies with Anathoth Reading Land, Reading Jeremiah in the Paintings of Michael Shepherd Emily Colgan

New Zealand has [always] been a theological landscape, [as is] evident in McCahon’s early biblical paintings. Even in the later absence of figurative narratives, McCahon’s works still resonate with the presence of the Almighty. Shepherd responds to this tradition in a new way, with landscapes that call to mind Old Testament rather than New.1 In early 2013, I had the privilege of viewing an exhibition entitled Anathoth by the renowned New Zealand artist Michael Shepherd.2 As I  perused the collection, I  found myself captivated by a painting of an innocuous young sheep, beside which was an inscription that read: ‘FOR EVIL LOOMS OUT OF THE NORTH (SOUTH DOWN)’. Both this image and the exhibition’s title, Anathoth, struck me as being evocative references to the biblical book of Jeremiah. They sparked in me an interest in the dialogical relationship between the Bible and Shepherd’s work, and challenged me to seek out an appropriate reading strategy for exploring such a relationship. What follows, then, is an attempt to articulate a suitable methodology, which will be employed to examine the interaction between Shepherd’s Anathoth series and the book of Jeremiah. In this project, I seek a method of inquiry that will enable dialogue between various textual mediums, a method that is flexible enough to allow the interpreter to move between different texts and trace their connections. I have thus

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selected an intertextual approach based on its ability to attend to that which lies beyond the immediate bounds of any given text. Despite the increasing acceptance of intertextuality as a legitimate interpretive approach, questions regarding its application remain. I wish to begin, therefore, with a brief exploration of intertextuality as a general theory, before identifying a specific intertextual reading strategy and applying it to the texts in question. Intertextuality refers to the interconnectedness that underlies all texts.3 On the most basic level, this fundamental relatedness emphasizes the importance of prior texts, refuting the so-​called autonomy of an individual text and the notion of a text’s creation ex nihilo. Intertextual theory claims that no text can be created without ideas constructed from the building blocks of previous texts. By selecting ideas and images from a symbolic system which pre-​exists any author/​artist, all texts are understood to be reflections of prior texts, which contribute to the production of meaning in new texts.4 Every text encountered, therefore, becomes intelligible only by means of association with words and images that have already been seen, heard or read. Like the weave of a garment, Roland Barthes argues, a text is knit from encounters with prior texts.5 Intertextuality establishes, then, a perpetual process of deferral from one text to another, in an infinite fabric of texts that constitutes the symbolic universe. Texts spill over into other texts, shattering notions of direct, linear communication, as each text becomes an intersection of a text where at least one other text can be read.6 By entering into and engaging with this intertextual space of prior creations, each emerging text becomes the absorption, transgression and transformation of other texts. Julia Kristeva insists that any pre-​existing text is not swallowed whole but is changed  –​added to, subtracted from or rearranged  –​promoting, and seeking to promote, further dialogue.7 In this sense, the task of interpretation is always partial and incomplete, as texts are perpetually absorbed and transformed with each new dialogical encounter. The creation of a new text is thus a process of distortion and decentring, as the emergent text both recognizes and denies, supports and undermines a plethora of texts which have gone before. Indeed, this equivocal relationship between texts suggests that an intertextual citation is never innocent, but rather points to dialogical transformation as a rupture of that which precedes it. Celebrating the radical plurality and transformational quality of a text challenges historical-​critical scholarship where the task of interpretation involves

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identifying the ‘original meaning’ of a text, and where uncertainties or variations are highly problematic. In fact, the dialogical ambiguity of a word possessing simultaneously both a meaning (A) and multiple alternative meanings (not-​A) defies Aristotelian logic and subverts Western systems of reasoning. The univocal logic that argues for a 0–​1 sequence (true-​false, authority, singularity) is interrupted by an intertextual plurality (0–​x), which cannot be confined by reason.8 As such, intertextual dialogism disrupts notions of stable meaning, unquestionable authority and objective interpretation by insisting that the multiple voices be reinterpreted in light of each other. It struggles against perspectives that would uphold an ‘official’ point of view, and in this sense, threatens the authoritarian and hierarchical domination of the master.9 Intertextuality at this abstract level, however, is more interested in the broad symbolic systems that enable meaning-​making than in discerning relationships between particular texts. It has been criticized for being a difficult concept to use practically, because of the vast and undefined discursive space it designates.10 If, as Barthes claims, the quotations from which a text is constructed are ‘anonymous [and] irrecoverable . . . quotations without quotation marks’,11 then pinpointing a subject is at best highly problematic, as texts prove increasingly evasive the more one attempts to grasp them. While this theoretical level highlights the uncontainable and unstable fluidity of texts generally, the reader is faced with an immeasurable network of intertextual relations without a specific point of entry and lacks effective tools for analysis. Since the question is no longer whether a text is intertextually loaded, but with which texts it is loaded, and how it appropriates these texts, my approach will set about restricting the field of inquiry to the relationship between the book of Jeremiah and Michael Shepherd’s paintings. In order to establish coherent meaning within the infinite relational possibilities of these texts, I  draw on the work of Ziva Ben-​Porat, who offers a description of allusion as an interpretive device that limits the broad range of intertextual correspondences among texts by focusing on a narrower set of correspondences.12 As a form of symbolic recognition, allusion enables larger textual fields to be evoked in the process of interpretation. By recalling for the reader that which is already known, allusions bring to light connections between an alluding text (the text being read/​viewed) and an evoked text (the text to which the alluding text refers), allowing the alluding text to participate in the richness of prior

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creations. Rather than relativizing textual relations, allusion is used to listen for ‘that which flows into’.13 It becomes a tool for identifying the singular in a stream that comprises many contributors. Vital in determining the relationship between an alluding text and an evoked text is the discernment of what Ben-​Porat refers to as ‘markers’ within a text.14 A  marker is an identifiable element that has been ‘borrowed’ from an independent text, and which now acts as a signpost in the alluding text, indicating an intertextual connection. Markers range from explicit quotations to images, metaphors, themes and even individual words. The foreign nature of these markers signals a deficiency in the alluding text that can only be remedied by the evoked intertext. In this sense, Michael Riffaterre argues, a marker always contains a dual function in that it simultaneously presents a problem and points to where the solution is to be found.15 While an alluding text is usually comprehensible without the recognition of a marker and its intertextual connections, new depths of meaning become possible with a marker’s activation. It is important to emphasize at this point that exploring intertextual relations is a reader-​oriented enterprise, as it is the reader who perceives and interprets textual interplay. Because it is the interpreter who must recognize the existence of a marker, allusion depends for its full significance on the activity of this interpreter. ‘The reader is the very space’, insists Barthes, ‘in which are inscribed . . . all the citations out of which [texts are] made’.16 Meaning exists, therefore, in potentia in the patterns between the alluding text and its intertext, but is only ever realized through the activity of the reader. Meaning, then, cannot be limited to the author’s purpose, and the question of whether or not a built-​in guidance marker was authorially intended need not be raised in determining what it is that qualifies as an intertextual allusion.17 No longer the product of an author’s original thought, a text is understood as a space in which ‘potentially vast numbers of relations coalesce’, which are only worked into a coherent whole through the activity of the interpreter.18 By enabling identifiable connections between texts, the reader’s identification of allusion becomes the verifiable cross-​section where text and intertext meet. It thus lies at the heart of Ben-​Porat’s fourfold intertextual methodology,19 which I  will develop as a reading strategy for this project.

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The initial stage of Ben-​Porat’s approach is the recognition of a marker in the alluding text. Because of the nature of the texts I will be considering, such markers may include both words and images. The second phase of this methodology involves the identification of the evoked text. While this stage may appear to be an important prerequisite of the initial step, the marker will often refer to only a part of a larger text. Such identification will be established through an assessment of the plausibility of an intertextual connection between Shepherd’s work and the Jeremianic material. Questions will therefore be asked as to the availability of the intertext to the author of the alluding text. In addition to this, the strength of connection between the texts will be analyzed based upon multiple or repeated allusions. The consistent appearance of distinctive or rare imagery, for example, suggests that a tenable relationship is more likely. The third stage of Ben-​Porat’s method involves focusing on the interaction between the texts in question, looking for ‘the formation of at least one intertextual pattern’.20 This stage relates to the transformation of the evoked text by the alluding text, and consequently the interpretive emphasis returns to the marker as a trigger for this intertextual pattern. In exploring the transformation of the intertextual marker, I seek to analyze Shepherd’s reinterpretation of the Jeremianic imagery in the context of twenty-​first-​century Aotearoa. The final stage of this intertextual methodology is closely associated with the previous step, as it explores the greater intertextual patterns that are established as the evoked text is seen as a whole. Here, the interpretive focus moves beyond the allusional marker, enabling a dialogue between the alluding and evoked texts in their respective entireties. And so, having identified a methodological approach that complements the aims of this project, I turn now to its practical application. In searching for markers that might point to an initial intertextual connection, I begin by examining the alluding text –​Shepherd’s masterful depiction of the young sheep with the benign smile (Figure 1.1).21 The work is on acrylic and painted on a rectangular panel (350 x 600 mm), which has been marked with a vertical row of holes, such as those found on a pad or receipt booklet where sheets are torn off in turn. The holes suggest payment, but payment for what? An answer –​of sorts –​is found in the inscription painted in bold under the image of the sheep:  THE INVOICE SPOKEN FOR ANATHOTH. This reference to Anathoth is the most conspicuous marker pointing to the book

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Figure 1.1  Michael Shepherd, untitled painting from the Anathoth series, 2013.

of Jeremiah as an intertext evoked in Shepherd’s painting. Although Anathoth is repeatedly referenced throughout Jeremiah (1.1; 11.21, 23; 29.27), it is most well known for being the location of the field bought by the prophet despite the threat of imminent destruction by an invading army (32.6–​15). Less overt, but nonetheless significant, is the smaller, secondary inscription to the left of the sheep, which reads: ‘FOR EVIL LOOMS OUT OF THE NORTH (SOUTH DOWN)’. The phrase is a direct quotation from the NRSV translation of Jer. 6.1, a verse that introduces a passage depicting the violent attack on Jerusalem and the land surrounding it (6.1–​8): Flee for safety, O children of Benjamin, from the midst of Jerusalem! Blow the trumpet in Tekoa, and raise a signal on Beth-​haccherem; for evil looms out of the north, and great destruction. I have likened daughter Zion to the loveliest pasture. Shepherds with their flocks shall come against her. They shall pitch their tents around her; they shall pasture, all in their places.

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‘Prepare war against her; up, and let us attack at noon!’ ‘Woe to us, for the day declines, the shadows of evening lengthen!’ ‘Up, and let us attack by night, and destroy her palaces!’ For thus says the Lord of hosts: Cut down her trees; cast up a siege-​ramp against Jerusalem. This is the city that must be punished; there is nothing but oppression within her. As a well keeps its water fresh, so she keeps fresh her wickedness; violence and destruction are heard within her; sickness and wounds are ever before me. Take warning, O Jerusalem, or I shall turn from you in disgust, and make you a desolation, an uninhabited land.

The phrase ‘SOUTH DOWN’ seems to be a reference to the breed of the sheep depicted in the painting, which was introduced to New Zealand in the early 1840s. When viewed against the background of this passage, the image of the sheep becomes more nuanced, and one wonders whether this innocuous creature is, in fact, an allusion to the shepherds and their flock (6.3), who are bent on waging war against Jerusalem. We will return to explore these allusions in more detail presently. For now, however, we can say that this initial step has enabled the identification of three distinct markers in Shepherd’s painting which evoke the book of Jeremiah generally and Jer. 6.1–​8 specifically. Before I proceed further, it is important to confirm (to the extent that this is possible) the identity of the evoked text by ascertaining the plausibility of Jeremiah as an intertext. By his own admission, Michael Shepherd is a painter of histories –​both human histories and, more recently, contested environmental histories.22 Shepherd’s understated yet meticulous works are consciously intended as ‘social documents’, which draw attention to their inherent histories.23 It is New Zealand’s environmental history that is the primary subject of the Anathoth series and thus the subject of intertextual exchange.

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The connection with Jeremiah was initially sparked by a jar of Anathoth jam on Shepherd’s breakfast table. Fascinated by words and their etymologies, Shepherd traced the history of Anathoth back to the Old Testament prophet, whose vivid description of the destruction of his homeland inspired this collection.24 If further evidence were needed to verify the strength of an intertextual connection, it is found in the multiplicity of biblical references intimated by titles and texts inscribed in the margins of other works belonging to the Anathoth collection. One such work, for example, depicts a discarded engine block in an Onehunga scrapyard.25 It is entitled ‘Nebuchadnezzar’, an allusion to the king of Babylon who is referenced throughout Jeremiah and whose armies laid waste to the land of Judah.26 Another work alludes to the Babylonian exile, evoking the words of Psalm 137 with an inscription asking ‘How can we sing a new song in an alien country?’27 The list could go on, but at this point it is sufficient to claim a direct, linear connection between Shepherd’s paintings (the alluding texts) and the book of Jeremiah (the evoked text). So what is Shepherd trying to say about New Zealand’s ecological history by drawing on Jeremiah as an intertext for this series? In order to explore this further, I return to the painting of the sheep and the text of Jer. 6.1–​8, seeking the formation of an intertextual pattern. Jer. 6.1–​8 clearly depicts a context of war. Both senses of sight and sound are evoked in 6.1 as the reader hears the sounding of the šôpār (shofar) and sees the raising of the signal as troops are mustered and preparation is made for an attack on the city.28 Heightening a rising sense of terror at the imminence of battle is the cry of danger: ‘evil looms out of the north’. In the niphal form, the verb šqp (to loom) is a strong term, and its subject is commonly one who ‘looks down over’ a particular location.29 The depiction of a figure looming from the north serves a dual function in identifying the enemy as coming from Babylon (geographically north of Jerusalem) as well as pointing to the menacing strength and power of this enemy army. In accordance with the basic up/​ down dualities, the enemy is immediately placed ‘higher’ or ‘up’ in a position of dominance because of an ability to peer down upon the lowly –​and thus subordinate –​city of Jerusalem. Further strengthening the force of this enemy is the fact that it is God who initiates the destruction with the command to ‘consecrate war against her [the city]’ (v.4).30 Even God, it seems, is against this city –​and by extension, the land upon which the city sits.31

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Verse 3 introduces the means by which destruction will be carried out: the invading army takes the (metaphorical) form of shepherds and flock. The threat to the land is initially felt in the wordplay between the rā’â (evil) that ‘looms down’ from the north in v.1c, and the rō’îm (shepherds), found twice in v.3. A sense of sinister foreboding in this connection warns the reader that these ‘shepherds’ are doing more than harmlessly grazing their sheep. Confirmation of their destructive intentions is seen as the line continues, describing the placement of the shepherds and their sheep ‘all around the city’. The image of the menacing encampment of the shepherds’ tents captures a sense of the city’s suffocation as the enemy closes in, preparing to destroy. Finally, the city’s desolation is also depicted metaphorically, as the shepherds are seen ‘feeding’ their sheep all around the city.32 In exploiting the land for their own agricultural initiative, the shepherds’ feeding of their flock here represents a symbolic conquest of both the city and the surrounding environment. In this text, both shepherd and sheep participate in the conquest of the land; they are both agents of terror and the source of the land’s destruction. This image is shocking because in an agricultural context, shepherds and sheep are traditionally associated with safety, security –​even prosperity. Here, however, destruction emerges from within this domesticated realm of order and control. By turning against the land in ravenous desire, both shepherd and sheep become the embodiment of violence and destruction in this passage.33 It is this violent encounter that will reduce the ‘delicate pasture’ (Jer. 6.2) to wilderness, preempting the image of the desolate wasteland in 6.8. The violence inflicted by shepherd and sheep means that the land is no longer able to sustain life. It is this grim account of Jerusalem’s ruination that seems to have touched on Shepherd’s sense of unease about his own homeland. Indeed, when viewed with this Jeremianic text in mind, the image of the innocent-​looking sheep becomes unmistakably ominous. Through this intertextual exchange, Shepherd reformulates the Jeremianic narrative, enabling it to resonate anew in the context of Aotearoa. Always a tonal painter, Shepherd works with a reduced palette here, creating a sense of hopelessness and despair. Using acrylics rather than oil, he skillfully employs a range of techniques that ensure texture mimics content in this work: paint dragged using cotton-​balls and rags alludes to erosion, the drips and runs of fluid evoke images of seepage and effluent, the spatters of paint suggest pollutants in the air and the absorbed pigments point to

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mud and mire.34 Like the sheep of Jer. 6.1–​8, Shepherd’s lamb appears to be the perpetrator of horrific ecological disaster, laying waste to the land. Instead of signifying an invading army, Shepherd’s sheep has been reformulated to represent the agents of environmental degradation in Aotearoa. Where Jeremiah’s sheep partook in the ruin of Jerusalem, so Shepherd’s sheep seems to be culpable of ecological violations such as large-​scale deforestation, the ‘grasslands revolution’ and the pollution of rivers and waterways as a result of agricultural waste and untreated sewage.35 Thus, although Shepherd claims to be a painter of history, a more politicized layer of meaning emerges through the identification and exploration of the Jeremianic intertext. More than simply an artistic contemplation of New Zealand’s environmental landscape, Shepherd’s work is an impassioned critique of the deteriorating ecological state of this country. The final stage of this methodology focuses on identifying greater intertextual patterns, enabling dialogue between the Anathoth collection in its entirety and the book of Jeremiah as a whole. Each of the twenty-​six other paintings in Shepherd’s series is inscribed with the words ‘THE INVOICE SPOKEN FOR ANATHOTH’, and every individual work is presented on a perforated board that mimics an invoice. Although the collection contains a broad diversity of images, each painting has as its subject the desolation of the New Zealand environment. The images, writes Elizabeth Rankin, lack crisp colours.36 They are myopic, tactile landscapes that echo both the melancholy and the critique that was seen in the painting of the Southdown sheep. In an overwhelming majority of instances where intertextual connections are evoked in these works, Shepherd appears to be alluding to the Jeremianic war rhetoric which focuses on the land’s destruction and which characterizes much of this biblical book. The ranks of intensively farmed corn standing sentinel in Figure 1.2,37 for example, evoke the descriptions of the unstoppable Babylonian army marching in full force from the north (Jer. 31.1, 5; 52.4). The threatening, hard-​edged hook of a digger depicted in meticulous detail in Figure 1.3 calls to mind the hard-​edged weapons of war, which, in Jeremiah (6.23, 25), include swords, javelins and bows. The rubbish piled high in the painting entitled ‘TEL’, echoes images of a land that has been left in ruins in the wake of the Babylonian army (Jer. 4.20, 23; 7.34; 25.11–​12, 38; 33.12; 44.6, 22) (Figure 1.4). The earthy ochres of the barren and polluted environments empty of human and animal presence, in Figure  1.5, recalls the haunting silence of

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Figure 1.2.  Michael Shepherd, untitled painting from the Anathoth series, 2011–​13.

Figure 1.3.  Michael Shepherd, untitled painting from the Anathoth series, 2011–​13.

the uninhabited towns and cities that have fallen victim to the Babylonian onslaught (2.15; 4.7; 9.11; 26.9; 34.22; 44.2). And the solitary felled tree, falling upon a starkly desolate landscape in Figure 1.6 is suggestive of Jerusalem, ravaged and stripped of all its trees, the land laid bare as a sign of military victory (6.6; 7.20). In drawing upon the book of Jeremiah as the primary intertext for

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Figure 1.4.  Michael Shepherd, ‘TEL’ from the Anathoth series, 2011–​13.

Figure 1.5.  Michael Shepherd, untitled painting from the Anathoth series, 2011–​13.

the Anathoth series, Shepherd seems to be comparing the condition of New Zealand’s environment to the decimated landscape of a city laid waste by war. There have been few –​very few –​cautionary voices highlighting the ongoing ecological demise of the environment in Aotearoa New Zealand. To speak publically on this issue is to negate the rhetoric of a nation that proudly

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Figure 1.6.  Michael Shepherd, untitled painting from the Anathoth series, 2011–​13.

perceives itself as ‘clean and green’, as evidenced by the tourism industry that markets New Zealand’s ‘unspoiled outdoors’ with images of this country’s stunning mountain and lake scenery.38 It is also an unpopular position to take because it challenges the traditional practices of the agricultural industry, which still forms the backbone of the New Zealand economy and wields considerable political power. And yet Shepherd’s art work seems to be a heartfelt and deliberate critique of the environmental practices in New Zealand, which are pushing this land beyond its ecological limits. Shepherd’s Anathoth series offers insights that go beyond the postcard images of New Zealand’s abundant beauty, revealing a land where the ancient and diverse indigenous ecosystems have been comprehensively wiped out. In this honest –​if brutal –​depiction of the ecological reality in Aotearoa, a final intertextual connection is established: that between Michael Shepherd and the prophet Jeremiah. There is a mournful quality to Shepherd’s work that echoes the sense of suffering and hopelessness that characterizes the book of Jeremiah. Yet the pain that is so clearly identifiable in both texts does not temper the urgency with which author and artist seek to impart their devastating message. Both prophet and painter are uncompromising in their refusal to perpetuate the rhetoric of the dominant discourse, which idealizes reality and assures that all is well. In every sense, Michael Shepherd stands in the tradition of biblical prophets.

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And yet, for all that these bleak paintings critique the ecological degradation of the land in Aotearoa, they do not deny the possibility of hope –​another similarity shared with the book of Jeremiah. I return, then, to the perforated boards that resemble invoices in demand of payment, and ask once more: payment for what? As the Babylonian army marched south towards Jerusalem, Anathoth was left in ruins. In a symbolic gesture reflecting his faith that this conquered territory would prosper once more, Jeremiah purchased his cousin’s field at Anathoth, paying the full asking price (Jer. 32.9). By using these unconventional templates as the basis for each painting in this series, Shepherd has created promissory notes for the despoiled land of Aotearoa.39 Like the desolate field at Anathoth, so the disfigured New Zealand landscape holds hope –​however faint –​of healing and renewal.

Notes 1. Elizabeth Rankin, Anathoth and Other Pottles (Auckland: Whitespace, 2013), 3. 2. This series was exhibited at Whitespace gallery in Auckland between 26 February and 17 March 2013. 3. The term was introduced by Julia Kristeva and was developed in her essay ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 34–​61. 4. Within the context of this chapter I use the term ‘text’ to refer to both literary and artistic forms of communication. 5. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1978), 159. 6. Kristeva, ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’, 37. 7. Ibid., 39. ‘The term intertextuality’, she explains, ‘denotes [the] transposition of one (or several) sign system(s) into another’. See Julie Kristeva, ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’, in Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader, 111. 8. Kristeva, ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’, 41–​2. 9. Kristeva points out that for Bakhtin, the notion of dialogism relates closely to his idea of the carnival, which disrupts the monological order promoted by dominant power groups (ibid., 48–​51). 10. Jonathan Culler, ‘Presupposition and Intertextuality’, in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction, ed. Jonathan D. Culler (London: Routledge, 2001), 114.

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11. Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’, in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-​ Structuralist Criticism, ed. J. V. Harari (New York: Cornell University Press, 1979), 77. 12. Ziva Ben-​Porat, ‘The Poetics of Literary Allusion’, PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 1 (1976): 105–​28. 13. Mary Orr, Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), 84. 14. Ben-​Porat, ‘Poetics’, 110. 15. Michael Riffaterre, ‘Compulsory Reader Response: The Intertextual Drive’, in Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, ed. Michael Worton and Judith Still (New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), 58. See also Ben-​Porat, ‘Poetics’, 107–​8. 16. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, 54. 17. Although, given the sheer number of overt Jeremianic allusions in Shepherd’s work, it is my strong suspicion that the ‘markers’ embedded within these paintings were, in fact, consciously intended by the author. 18. Graham Allen, Intertextuality (New York: Routledge, 2000), 12. 19. Ben-​Porat, ‘Poetics’, 105–​28. 20. Ibid., 110. 21. All images have been used courtesy of the artist and Whitespace gallery. 22. Claudia Bell, Excavating the Past: Michael Shepherd, Artist (Wellington: Gilt Edge, 2005), 6. Bell quotes Shepherd as saying he is ‘quite consciously a history painter’. Painting history, he says, ‘has become a compulsive activity, just continually trying to reconstruct those long-​banished worlds’. 23. Ibid., 6. 24. Rankin, Anathoth, 1. 25. Onehunga is a residential and light-​industrial suburb in Auckland. 26. Jer. 27.6, 8, 20; 28.3, 11; 29.1, 3. 27. Biblical allusions also resonate in Shepherd’s painting of a dilapidated trailer dumped on the Bombay Hills entitled Altar, and in the image of a polluted paddock pool entitled Baptism. 28. This imagery appears also in 4.5–​6, 19, 21 and 6.17. 29. This verb is most commonly used either to refer to YHWH ‘looking down’ from above (Exod. 14.24; Deut. 26.15; Pss 14.2; 53.2; 102.19; Lam. 3.50) or to a person peering down out of a window (Jdg. 5.28; 2 Sam. 6.16; 2 Kgs 9.30; Prov. 7.6; 1 Chron. 15.29). 30. Typically translated in the weakened sense of ‘prepare’, qaddešû is more appropriately rendered ‘consecrate’. If more evidence were needed in support of YHWH’s direct involvement in this attack, it is found in the epithet yhwh ṣebāaôt. While ṣebāaôt is invariably understood as ‘hosts’, alternative

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translations of this noun include ‘army’ or ‘war’, expanding the meaning of the epithet to include ‘YHWH of armies’ or ‘YHWH of war’. 31. Throughout Jeremiah, the city is constantly aligned with the land, making it difficult, at times, to distinguish between these distinct entities. Implicit in most treatments of the city in Jeremiah is an assumption that ‘city’ refers to a fixed physical entity with roads and houses, surrounded by a defensive wall or protective structure; see, for example, F. W. Dobbs-​Allsopp, Weep, O Daughter of Zion: A Study of the City-​Lament Genre in the Hebrew Bible (Rome: Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 1993), 87; Nicolae Roddy, ‘Landscape of Shadows: The Image of City in the Hebrew Bible,’ in Cities through the Looking Glass: Essays on the History and Archaeology of Biblical Urbanism, ed. Rami Arav (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2008), 13. Also embedded in this assumption is a second layer of meaning, where the city is understood as a metonym for its human inhabitants. It is my contention, however, that these underlying conjectures fall short in their conception of the city by neglecting to consciously locate it in the land. Without land the city is merely a collection of people and buildings existing in space. This notion of city does not adequately account for the acute sense of anguish and loss surrounding the prospect of the city’s imminent destruction by ever-​advancing enemies (Jer. 2.15; 4.7; 7.34; 8.16; 47.2; 51.43). The significance of the city as a place of deep attachment and identity lies primarily in an understanding of this entity as a geographical location –​the city is grounded in the land. 32. Elsewhere I have argued that this poem depicts a highly gendered interaction between the land, God and the conquering army and that the text’s language and imagery reveal an underlying rhetoric of rape. See Emily Colgan, ‘“Come Upon Her”: Land as Raped in Jeremiah 6.1–​8’, in Sexuality, Ideology and the Bible: Antipodean Engagements, ed. Robert J. Myles and Caroline Blyth, Bible in the Modern World 70 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2015), 20–​34. 33. Julie Galambush, ‘This Land Is My Land: On Nature as Property in the Book of Ezekiel,’ in ‘Every City Shall Be Forsaken’: Urbanism and Prophecy in Ancient Israel and the Near East, ed. Lester L. Grabbe and Robert D. Haak (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 73–​80, also notes the opposition between the categories ‘wild animals’ and livestock, and the way in which domestic animals turned wild evoke a picture of destruction. 34. Rankin, Anathoth, 4. 35. The ‘grasslands revolution’ began at the start of the twentieth century and involved transforming much of the New Zealand landscape into land suitable for sheep farming. It would continue for the following eighty years. By combining large-​scale bush clearance with the introduction of vigorous exotic grasses and the use of both herbicides and fertilisers, over 51 percent of the

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land’s surface area was transformed into grasslands. The sheep population in this country increased from 1.5 million in 1858 to 13.1 million just twenty years later, and peaked at just over 70 million in 1982. To this day, a significant number of New Zealand streams, rivers and lakes suffer from dangerous levels of pollution as a result of decades of phosphorus and nitrogen seeping into the waters from poor farming waste practices on the land cleared during this environmental revolution. 36. Rankin, Anathoth, 3. 37. The paintings from the Anathoth series depicted in Figures 1.1–​1.6 are untitled, with the exception of 1.4, which is called ‘TEL’. 38. Since 1999, New Zealand has employed a marketing campaign which brands this country as ‘100% Pure’. The brand seeks to promote –​at least in part –​the image of the New Zealand environment as ‘pure’ –​pristine and untouched. 39. Rankin, Anathoth, 7.

Bibliography Allen, Graham. Intertextuality. New York: Routledge, 2000. Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press, 1978. Barthes, Roland. ‘From Work to Text’. In Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-​ Structuralist Criticism, edited by J. V. Harari, 73–​81. New York: Cornell University Press, 1979. Bell, Claudia. Excavating the Past: Michael Shepherd, Artist. Wellington: Gilt Edge, 2005. Ben-​Porat, Ziva. ‘The Poetics of Literary Allusion’. PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 1 (1976): 105–​28. Colgan, Emily. ‘“Come Upon Her”: Land as Raped in Jeremiah 6:1–​8’. In Sexuality, Ideology and the Bible: Antipodean Engagements, edited by Robert J. Myles and Caroline Blyth, 20–​34. Bible in the Modern World 70. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2015. Culler, Jonathan. ‘Presupposition and Intertextuality’. In The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction, edited by Jonathan D. Culler, 110–​31. London: Routledge, 2001. Dobbs-​Allsopp, F. W. Weep, O Daughter of Zion: A Study of the City-​Lament Genre in the Hebrew Bible. Rome: Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 1993. Galambush, Julie. ‘This Land Is My Land: On Nature as Property in the Book of Ezekiel’. In ‘Every City Shall Be Forsaken’: Urbanism and Prophecy in Ancient

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Israel and the Near East, edited by Lester L. Grabbe and Robert D. Haak, 71–​94. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001. Kalmanofsky, Amy. Terror All Around: Horror, Monsters, and Theology in the Book of Jeremiah. New York: T&T Clark, 2008. Kristeva, Julia. ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’. In Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader, 34–​61. Kristeva, Julia. ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’. In Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader, 89–​136. Moi, Toril (ed.). The Kristeva Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. Orr, Mary. Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003. Rankin, Elizabeth. Anathoth and Other Pottles. Auckland: Whitespace, 2013. Riffaterre, Michael. ‘Compulsory Reader Response: The Intertextual Drive’. In Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, edited by Michael Worton and Judith Still, 56–​78. New York: Manchester University Press, 1990. Roddy, Nicolae. ‘Landscape of Shadows: The Image of City in the Hebrew Bible’. In Cities through the Looking Glass: Essays on the History and Archaeology of Biblical Urbanism, edited by Rami Arav, 11–​21. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2008.

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2

Darryn George The Meeting of Modernism and Māori Tradition Robin Woodward

Darryn George, a New Zealand artist of Ngapuhi descent, was born in 1970 at Christchurch, where he still lives. Graduating with a BFA (painting) from the Ilam School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury in 1993, George gained his diploma of teaching from Christchurch College of Education the following year and graduated with an MFA (painting) from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in 1998. He brings together the roots of his Christian faith and his Māori heritage in the form of Modernist abstract paintings. George is one of a coterie of twentieth-​century New Zealand artists, both Māori and Pākehā,1 who have drawn on Māori patterns and cultural traditions to inform their work. During the 1950s and 1960s, young Māori artists such as Ralph Hotere and Paratene Matchitt began to employ the styles and forms of European Modernism while adapting themes and motifs of their own culture. Since then, at least three generations of Māori artists have made an impact on the New Zealand and international art world, forming a lineage of tīpuna (ancestors), upon which George’s artistic whakapapa (pedigree) is based. Being connected to the Northland Ngapuhi tribe, George is kin to artists Shane Cotton, Ralph Hotere, Jonathan Mane-​Wheoki and Lisa Reihana. A  number of these artists have explored their ancestral affiliation and the influence of early Christianity in New Zealand through the ‘profoundly spiritual world view of the ancestors’.2

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Raised as a Christian European New Zealander with Māori heritage, George was not initially interested in exploring Māori culture.3 Instead, in his early years as a painter he was influenced by two areas of European art history: on the one hand, he was drawn to the signs and symbols of his Christian heritage; on the other, he focused on aspects of international Modernism as his visual vocabulary. His lecturers at art school, particularly Riduan Tomkins at Ilam and David Thomas at RMIT, brought this international perspective to George’s thinking and introduced him to the work of Abstract Expressionist and Colour Field painters such as Richard Diebenkorn, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Although colour blind, George was drawn to the use of colour, experimenting with combinations in colour charts since his earliest days. George has always explored the human condition in his art. In the process, he eschews traditional tools of representation, such as recognizable objective forms, in favour of the geometric patterns that characterize his work. This forces the viewer’s attention onto the two dimensionality of the work and explores the Modernist concern with the surface of a painting. Both features are exemplified by early works such as This Generation (1999) (Figure 2.1) and Sometime after Manet (1998) (Figures 2.2 and 2.3), which employ the visual

Figure 2.1  Darryn George, This Generation, 1999.

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Figure 2.2  Darryn George, Sometime after Manet, 1998.

languages of Op Art and Pop Art4 to convey the subliminal influence of electronic media on the decline in moral standards among the youth of the day. These works were inspired by New Zealand’s 1954 Mazengarb Report on the morality of youth, which highlighted the effect of baby-​boomer philosophies of free love, drugs and rock music on the morals of the next generation.5 It was not until the mid-​1990s that George began to realize the artistic value of his Māori heritage. Before that, he explains, ‘In my early art-​making years, I couldn’t make any connections to Māori art, either the contemporary or the traditional forms. In fact I believed I had an aesthetic not tuned to such art forms.’6 It was a trip to an arts hui (gathering/​meeting) at Whangara on the East Coast in 1994 that proved to be a turning point. Here, George was introduced to Pineamine Taiapa’s distinctive carvings in the house Te Whitireia, which was ‘regarded by Pine himself as the best he had done. It held special significance for him as a spiritual centre of his own Ngati Porou people’.7 George

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Figure 2.3  Darryn George, Sometime after Manet (detail), 1998.

immediately felt ‘at home’ at Whangara; in the marae (traditional Māori tribal meeting place) environment, he recognized elements of his own upbringing. It was at this hui also that a Christian kaumātua (Māori elder), Hone Taumaunu, who was aware of George’s Christian faith, impressed upon him that he could use the vocabulary of Māori imagery to translate Christian themes and ideas. George started to see connections. Visiting a number of Māori wharenui (meeting houses) during the late 1990s, he was inspired by the aesthetic, conceptual and narrative associations that he recognized existed between Modernist geometric abstraction and the kōwhaiwhai (scroll) and tukutuku (lattice) designs he saw in wharenui.8 As he explains: I have always been interested in patterns . . . meeting houses have hundreds of patterns all worked in with each other  –​you never see interior design done this way, it is all minimal these days. Even in dress, people say, ‘don’t wear the striped tie with the striped shirt’. But there it is in the house, so full on, so much information . . . Then there is the fact I could sit in this house and an old man would stand up and tell stories from the artworks.9

Enlisting the language of Māori aesthetics to express a personal Christian ethos, George developed Tipuna, a series of paintings exhibited at the Brooke Gifford

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Gallery, Christchurch, in 2003. In these works, he addresses the relationship between three areas of art history that focus on pattern and colour –​the primary colours of the De Stijl movement,10 1950s abstraction and traditional Māori patterning –​channelling them all towards his personal, spiritual and social agenda. All of the formally structured paintings of the Tipuna series are associated with salvation and draw on Māori patterning, such as the poutama or stepped ‘stairway to heaven’ patterns of traditional woven wall panels. For George these poutama are transformed into a motif for the steps of faith taken towards God. He cites Heb. 11.6: ‘And without faith it is impossible to please God because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.’ Paintings in this series are named after heroic figures of the Old Testament (some of whom are listed in the New Testament text of Hebrews 11), who have gone before and entered heaven. This was the primary motivation for the series  –​these biblical figures, like George and his ancestors, lived by faith. Māori versions of their names become the titles of George’s Tipuna paintings, summoning the shades of his ancestors who made sense of this new religion by relating it to their own concepts and practices.11 In Ihaia (Isaiah) (Figure 2.4) from the Tipuna series, George experiments with combining traditional Māori patterns and Modernist colours with his personal vocabulary. Symbolizing growth, a simplified spiral in yellow and black leaps out of the left-​hand side of the canvas, almost overpowering an identical pattern repeated on the right, one that derives from a bridge icon found on maps. The optical conventions of Op Art fight a visual battle with the receding red, white and beige colourways in an uneasy optical balance between modern and traditional conventions. This painting is an example of George working through a process. It shows him coming to terms with the marrying of two distinct traditions in which he recognizes similarities (e.g. the underlying patterns) as well as the differences in their expression. Nevertheless, George’s art remains independent of an indigenous perspective and free of regionalist associations with New Zealand. Keen for his work to be understood by people of any country or culture, he has always considered minimal, geometric, abstraction-​type work as most likely to have meaning for a wide international audience. In essence, abstract painting ignores references to recognizable objects and to notions of narrative, aiming instead

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Figure 2.4  Darryn George, Ihaia, 2003.

to be completely self-​referential. As George recognizes, this means that artists can make the language of abstraction say whatever they want to say. As he explains, ‘I guess for most artists the nature of the content comes from who they are as a person. Some work from a place of spiritual conviction, so they make the language say something about that. Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Colin McCahon come to mind.’12 In a similar vein, George wanted to create an artistic language that reflected him personally, one that moved beyond the marks and symbols of the Christian heritage that informed his early work such as Kupu Tuturu (assurance), which features the Christian cross as its central motif (Figure 2.5). While references to the Bible may be implied in his paintings, George is at pains to offer the viewer works of art that allow the freedom of a range of interpretations. Lara Strongman considers that his paintings ‘fulfil Umberto Eco’s definition of an “open work”: a configuration of stimuli whose

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Figure 2.5  Darryn George, Kupu Tuturu, 1994.

substantial indeterminacy allows for a number of possible readings, a “constellation” of elements that lend themselves to all sorts of reciprocal relationships’.13 George found just such a ‘configuration of stimuli’ in the variety of interworked patterns in the wharenui he visited. These patterns, on the ridgepole of a wharenui, for example,14 represent tribal genealogy and have a deep spiritual significance. Traditional Māori artists took patterns from nature and simplified or stylized them, loading them with narrative content before making them available to the community in forms that became part of their cultural story. George, fascinated by the beauty and ‘noble purpose’ in this way of conveying content, creates his own geometric compositions which are informed by the rich rhythms and cadences of customary designs. As an example, he uses panels of generic kōwhaiwhai and moko (a form of Māori tattoo design)15 motifs alongside, and interwoven with, broad bands of colour, abstract letter forms and words.

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Figure 2.6  Darryn George, Takuta #6, 2012.

Words form the core of many of George’s paintings. In works such as the Karakia series (2012), he utilizes the repetition of a word as an abstract motif and as symbolic text. In form and content these works bring to mind the biblical passage, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (Jn 1.1). In Karakia, developed after the artist’s experience of living through the 2010 and 2011 Christchurch earthquakes, George continues his exploration of aspects of divinity as expressed by the Old Testament prophet Isaiah and within the New Testament gospels. The title, Karakia, means prayer or rapidly recited chants using traditional language, symbols and structures. The structure of each painting in the series, for example, Takuta #6 (Figures 2.6 and 2.7), is composed in this manner, based on the visual rhythm of repeated Māori words (kupu reo) such as rata (doctor) and manukura (leader), which become the main visual element of the paintings. The kupu (words) in this painting, George explains, operate as signifiers of

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Figure 2.7  Darryn George, Takuta #6 (detail), 2012.

support services needed in times of crisis, but they are also used more profoundly as signposts of hope. Moreover, they are terms signifying God, as the deity is portrayed metaphorically in the Bible as doctor (Lk. 4.23), keeper (Jn 17.12) and leader (Isa. 55.4). Sharing a formal and spiritual home with George’s Christchurch earthquake works is Rata Wallwork (Figure 2.8), painted for the city of Tauranga after the environmental disaster of the Rena in 2011.16 Based on the original Christchurch painting Rata #5 (2011–​12), Rata Wallwork was painted directly onto the walls of the Tauranga Art Gallery Toi Tauranga in 2012. In this large work (7 x 10 m), George considers the shared misfortunes of his home town, Christchurch, and Tauranga. As he explains, ‘Rata is a very suitable word to use in relation to the Canterbury earthquakes and the Rena environmental disaster. Both regions need a doctor to heal the land and the people.’ In Rata Wallwork, the towering black and white letters seem to form enormous

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Figure 2.8  Darryn George, Rata Wallwork, 2012.

columns lifting a lintel of the horizontally repeated word skywards. Whether arranged horizontally or vertically, these words suggest the various manifestations and workings of God. The pattern was originally conceived as a waterfall, pointing to cleansing, both spiritual and physical. The structural effect of the black and white forms is mediated by horizontal panels of brown curvilinear patterns that hint at the panels of the wharenui and the voices of ancestors. The visual structure of these paintings echoes the megalithic bridges, crosses and words used in the works of Colin McCahon.17 As the Karakia series developed, so too did the lexicon that George employed  –​kaitiaki (guardian), rata and tākuta (doctor), rangatira (chief), hēpara (shepherd), piki (helper) and rata kokoti (surgeon). However, everything begins with Atua (God). In his painting Atua #4 (2011), the word ‘Atua’ is repeated over and over, in varying sizes, colours and orientation; the word seems like a prayer for help, ‘sometimes small and whispered in the quiet; at others, appearing on a large scale and cried out in alarm’.18 Individual letters are outlined in white on a black ground or blocked in with a textured surface against a smooth finish. Alternating, they form a panel of delicate red on a beige ground. George’s patterning of words here challenges the viewer

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to look beyond the need to associate with a recognizable image. His abstract form evokes an experience that requires the viewer to concentrate on the form before considering the literal and symbolic meanings of the word. It is by this process of discovery that George generates a contemplative place for viewers to consider their own experiences and perceptions of the divine. Embodied in the background of the Atua paintings (2011–​12) is a moko design. George explains that this was a basic attempt to build in honour and reverence for the subject of the art works. Each of the moko incorporates recognizable symbolism. In Atua #8, for example, the moko design is the butterfly of hope and resurrection; in Atua #7, it is a waterfall, signifying cleansing. Snowflakes in Atua #4 (Figure  2.9) suggest cleansing and renewal, and the moko design in Atua #9 appears as a halo or crown of thorns. The eponymous Atua Psalm 130 relates specifically to the hope-​filled Song of Ascent, Psalm 130, and thus the star motif in this work is a reference to hope –​the morning star, a ray of light shining through the darkness. There are other meanings that can be read into the content and symbolism of these paintings; the glow or halos surrounding some of the letters can be understood as light, a symbol of salvation in Christian theology. The cloud-​like glow also has references to

Figure 2.9  Darryn George, Atua #4, 2011–​12.

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Figure 2.10  Darryn George, Pulse, 2008.

Moses and the Israelites following the cloud that symbolized God’s presence through the wilderness towards the Promised Land (Exod. 13.21). In the Atua series, George layers blurred outlines, recessive colours, subtle patterning and bold geometric letter-​shapes with stark red, black and white colours in order to stimulate a pattern of optical illusion. Similar features –​the rhythmic patterning of language, shape and colour –​provide the powerful visual basis of one of George’s most significant works, Pulse (2008) (Figures 2.10 and 2.11). This site-​specific painting wrapped itself around the interior walls of the William Sutton Gallery in the Christchurch Art Gallery, Te Puna O Waiwhetu, for the six months between March and August 2008.19 Art projects on this scale are generally intended to facilitate a more direct exchange between the work and the viewer, re-​establishing a closer relationship between art and life. They tend to have a symbiotic relationship with their audience, requiring the physical presence of viewers, and their interaction with the work, to help generate its meaning. Moreover, such works designed for specific sites also rely on the particular characteristics of the site as a core component of the work. George’s initial response to the Sutton Gallery came directly from his cultural roots; to him, it was a meeting house waiting to be brought to life.

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Figure 2.11  Darryn George, Pulse, 2008.

He envisioned a space that incorporated Māori and Christian histories and the telling of stories about life and death in a melting pot of visual elements that would be reminiscent of the visual complexity of many wharenui. Consequently, Pulse completely engulfed the Sutton Gallery, covering more than 300 square metres of wall space as well as the structural, central supporting pillar.20 Often this pillar is seen as an impediment to viewing work that is hung on the walls of the gallery, but for George, it informed the core idea of his work, becoming a central feature of Pulse (Figure 2.12). He saw it as alluding to the structure of the wharenui, which, with its highly patterned rafters and wall patterns, had informed so much of his abstract work since the turn of the century. In a wharenui, the central pillar holds up the whole structure, and the imagery on it is reserved for the most important historical tribe member. George likens this to Christian theological understandings of Jesus, expressed in New Testament writings such as Paul’s letter to the Colossians: ‘He is before all things and in Him all things consist’ (Col. 1.17). On one wall of Pulse, the bold, formal patterns of black, red and white –​and slices of purple –​soar from floor to ceiling, reminding the viewer of the powerful cultural force that simple repetitive patterns generate. The installation

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Figure 2.12  Darryn George, Pulse (detail –​central pillar), 2008.

fuses modern abstract colours, shapes and textures with the idea of the traditional wharenui, creating a spiritual ‘big house’ within the art gallery, a place that can be said to engender its own processes of reverence. George draws on the notion of the wharenui as a place of learning, where information about the people, their history and their geography can be read in the patterns of walls and rafters, as if in the pages of books. He makes a correlation between the wharenui as a place of learning –​guided by the poutama patterns –​and the pathway to higher learning, or transcendence, in biblical texts. In modern Western art, abstraction as a means to transcendence is central to the roots of the geometric abstraction movement. To European Modernist artists such as Piet Mondrian and others in the De Stijl movement who were influential in the development of George’s ideas, a reduced palette and geometric shapes arranged with the utmost simplicity were a means of attaining spiritual order and harmony. George makes the link to the wharenui as a

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meeting place of visual and spiritual ideas that are combined in both figurative and abstract forms. As a place of meeting, conversation and debate about everyday things, about belief systems and about historical events, the wharenui is a spiritual place, a place of communication. George describes his father’s marae, Ngaitonga, in Northland’s Bland Bay, as a place with little decoration but with a strong culture of waiata (singing). He remembers it as ‘a place of words’. Pulse was designed to transform a room in an art gallery into a similar space, one in which words are spoken, a place for dialogue. The culture of waiata on the marae of George’s whānau (extended family) should not be overlooked. Lara Strongman and Gregory O’Brien both make a comparison between George’s patterning and the repetitive patterns and partial repetitions in classical music. To Strongman, the meditative effect of repeated compositional elements has a similar religious or spiritual import to the work of such sacred minimalist composers as Arvo Pärt and Sir John Tavener.21 The sound spaces introduced by these composers might, she suggests, be read in the way that George’s large areas of black paint provide a ground upon which a note or a gesture plays. The incessant visual rhythms remind O’Brien of the preludes and fugues of J. S. Bach or the ‘homemade rhythms’ of New Zealand’s own performance group, From Scratch.22 In a similar manner, the chromatic abstractions of many of George’s paintings invoke the rhythms of Māori action songs such as the poi dance and the haka. This musical analogy is brought into clear focus in The Equaliser (2006–​2007) (Figure 2.13), a series of ten works with high gloss red or black backgrounds, each featuring two vertical bars of pattern. Arranged together, the paintings function like a visual metronome, or like the movement of the pulsing lights of the graphic equalizer on a stereo system.23 The Equaliser also alludes to Christ’s sacrifice counteracting the power of sin, and resonates with McCahon’s works, such as The Fourteen Stations of the Cross (1966). In this painting, McCahon contemplates Christ’s passage to the cross; George too was interested in his work having a journey aspect to it. The bars in The Equaliser rise and then fall, perhaps symbolizing an expanded narrative: Christ’s growth in popularity, his rejection and then not just going to the cross but beyond, to the incarnation. This was developed to a more heightened level in Pulse, where George provided visual clues such as the forward momentum of diagonal lines to keep moving the viewer through the work.

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Figure 2.13  Darryn George, The Equaliser, 2006–​2007.

Connections between the various series of George’s works cannot be overemphasized. The vertical and diagonal lines in Pulse originally formed the basis of his Pukapuka (book) series in 2007–​2008. In Pulse, they appear in a larger and simpler format –​alternate panels of red and black, each framed in white and containing a single bar of colour. Arranged diagonally on one wall and vertically on the neighbouring wall, the panels are reminiscent of book spines on a shelf. This arrangement on opposing walls of the gallery creates a pattern that continually draws the eye of the viewer while encouraging visitors to move around the space by following the lines of the pattern. George explains that when planning Pulse he was conscious that the parameters of the room were very different from those governing either a stand-​alone painting or a mural covering a single wall. He was acutely aware of the need to ‘activate the viewer’s peripheral vision’,24 making sure all the walls were working together to facilitate the journey through the work. Viewers experience the area of an entire gallery differently from the discrete space of a single wall or a place that is occupied by a framed painting. In an installation such as Pulse, the viewer is ‘in’ the artwork, and the artist can utilize a variety of techniques to facilitate an immersive experience. In this work, George employs

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the leaning book forms and the selected use of a rich deep purple to lead the viewer through the space. Moreover, in Pulse, faith is writ large in the complex composition created out of the elements of the word ‘waru’ painted on the back wall of the gallery. Translated from Māori, waru means ‘eight’, which in biblical numerology is synonymous with resurrection and life after death.25 The repetition of the word ‘waru’ in different axial orientations, each delineated letter being a block of white, red or black, creates a wall that might be railed against or prayed in front of. A link can be made to customary practice on the marae of standing, singing or speaking in front of the end wall of a wharenui, having the support of ancestors in the form of carvings or photographs on the wall behind. Central to Pulse, on the single glossy black column in the centre of the Sutton Gallery, the word ‘waru’ is formed simply, seeming to speak across the room to the complex composition on the end wall, demonstrating the act and the process of communication. Constantly looking for ways to incorporate Modernist and customary tropes, George makes use of the multivalent function of symbols. The ‘w’ of waru, presented here in various axial orientations, becomes alternately an ‘m’ or the three-​fingered hand of Māori carving designs. George’s use of red, black and white operates in a similar fashion. It refers to the wairua (spirit) of Māori culture where red stands for mana (spiritual status), black for potential and white for mauri ora, or breathing space. Equally, these are the colours of European Modernists, particularly those of the De Stijl artists for whom only the three primary colours (red, blue and yellow) and the three ‘non-​colours’ (black, white and grey) were acceptable. As David Eggleton notes, ‘Red and black are held in standoff, while white flows and darts. White, too, enhaloes or hallows, while black resonates, offers a “reflection” of presence’.26 On one side of Pulse’s central pillar, a single dramatic ‘zip’ extends virtually from floor to ceiling. This vertical striped motif behaves like a line of light pulsing beyond the black ceiling, reminiscent, George suggests, of the shaft of light radiating from the heavens in Renaissance paintings, or YHWH as a pillar of fire dividing the cosmos in the creation account of Genesis 1. George confirms too that the strong vertical elements such as these, which are repeated on the glossy black back wall, are a reference to McCahon, who talked about light forms heading up to heaven.27 This single motif also unites

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Figure 2.14  Darryn George, The Lamb’s Book of Life (Folder Wall), 2010–​11.

Christian symbology with the iconography of Abstract Expressionism; Barnett Newman’s signature vertical line of colour was termed a zip in reference to its function to both divide and unite a composition simultaneously.28 In keeping with the terms of a commission for a temporary work, Pulse has ceased to exist as a physical artwork. In George’s words, ‘In the last week of August 2008 a person with a big paint roller came in and completely painted it all out.’ The artwork, as with life, exists, and then is gone, yet its ideas and form are carried forward into the next iteration, the next generation. Moreover, for George, Pulse was but one actualization of the multiplicity of biblical, intellectual and art historical associations that resonate throughout his images of faith. Within two years he had conceived another installation, The Lamb’s Book of Life (Folder Wall) (2010–​11) (Figure 2.14), which would eclipse the scale of any of his previous projects –​including Pulse. Measuring an impressive 29 x 29 m, The Lamb’s Book of Life (Folder Wall) was designed to cover the exterior facade of the Government Life Tower, directly opposite the iconic Anglican Christ Church Cathedral in Christchurch’s Cathedral Square. The work was to have been installed early in 2011 as part of the sixth Christchurch SCAPE biennial, an art event in which

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contemporary public art works are peppered throughout the urban centre.29 However, the earthquakes and aftershocks that devastated the city in 2010 and 2011 intervened. The Government Life Tower was located in one of the worst affected areas of the central business district; within a matter of minutes on 4 September 2010 The Lamb’s Book of Life (Folder Wall) was without a home. Eventually, in July 2011, as part of the postponed sixth SCAPE biennial, The Lamb’s Book of Life (Folder Wall) was installed on the west facade of the city council building at 53 Hereford Street, Christchurch. The Lamb’s Book of Life (Folder Wall) is based on a collection of paintings that George began in 2008 called Rehita, in which he examines the Book of Life from the New Testament’s book of Revelation (3.5; 13.8; 17.8; 20.12, 15; 21.27; c.f. Phil. 4.3). The Book of Life is sometimes referred to as the Lamb’s Book of Life (Rev. 13.8; 21.27), and it is there that the names of the righteous and those redeemed by the blood of Christ are recorded for eternity: And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened. And another book was opened, which is the Book of Life. And the dead were judged according to their works, by the things that were written in the books . . . And anyone who was not found written in the Book of Life was cast into the lake of fire. (Rev. 20.12–​15)

The Lamb’s Book of Life (Folder Wall) is based on themes and compositions that George had previously explored in his paintings. He employs the rhythmic patterning of language, shape and colour as the visual basis of his expression of themes and content from the Bible. Motivated by the paintings of European masters such as Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (1535–​41), George imagined the form of God’s record of humanity’s salvation. The result is a series of abstract paintings that resemble enormous filing cabinets. Nine of these make up the Rehita series, which includes paintings in a vertical format, along with others that are horizontal in orientation. Principally, the paintings are red or black, with the colours arranged in varying patterns: there are works in which the patterns, while regular, appear disrupted and randomly placed, in others there are small white rectangles stacked repeatedly one above the other. These are similar to The Lamb’s Book of Life for Christchurch’s SCAPE biennial art event in 2009, a glossy black painting in which a series of rectangles, each crisply delineated in white, sit one above the other in a column. Every level has

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a centrally positioned group of horizontal bars in red, white and black which form the impression of a handle, or perhaps a tag on which the contents of the drawer are identified. Automotive paint and polyurethanes ensure George’s perfection of the high-​ gloss black finishes of these paintings. His use of this highly reflective surface means that viewers cannot help but see themselves mirrored in the surface of a painting. By this means, people are encouraged to reflect on their lives while simultaneously becoming a subject of the work in front of them. Renaissance painters used a similar technique when they included their patrons as figures in religious scenes as a way of showing the strength of their faith and in an effort to increase the likelihood of their salvation. The earthquakes in Christchurch left in their wake disruption and upheaval to buildings, landscapes and lives. The association, albeit unintentional, between the original concept of Folder Wall and the effect of the violent natural disaster adds meaning to the artwork. The earthquakes left people in the city and its environs searching for friends and family among those named on a roll call of survivors. Moreover, somewhat ironically, the building for which Folder Wall was originally intended, the Government Life Tower, housed the offices of the Christchurch branch of the New Zealand Inland Revenue Department, an agency whose function relies heavily on the maintenance of public records and information about individuals.30 When asked what the work might mean for the people of Christchurch, George offers a variety of readings. These include revisiting memories, remembering lives lost and even recalling possessions, proposing that the work may have a memorial function. George suggests that the black mesh fabric on which Folder Wall is printed could allude to sackcloth which is traditionally made of coarse, rough, black goat’s hair, and which features in the Ancient Near Eastern ritual where those in mourning would clothe themselves in sackcloth and put ash on their heads or bodies (e.g. Jer. 6.26; Lam. 2.10; Jon. 3.5).31 Folder Wall grew into a room, The Folder Room (Figure 2.15), an installation designed for the Palazzo Bembo in Venice, which was arranged as part of a collateral exhibition at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Based on filing cabinet folders repeated again and again to fill a room with their glossy, reflective surfaces, The Folder Room also stems from George’s consideration of the Lamb’s Book of Life in the book of Revelation. Gleaming black panels, fabricated in New Zealand and

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Figure 2.15  Darryn George, Folder Room, 2013.

shipped to Venice, were erected and joined together in order to create a seamless void, transforming one of the spaces of the Palazzo Bembo into a wharenui-​ like space of contemplation and reflection. Fluorescent tubes softened by gauzy screens created an eerie ambience; in an international context, the folders take on wider associations of stored knowledge, history and information. George has always employed traditional motifs that refer to the sharing and storage of knowledge; the Kete (basket) series (2009), for example, focuses on the Māori concept of baskets of knowledge. This cross-​references with his Christian faith –​‘By wisdom a house is built, and through understanding it is established; through knowledge its rooms are filled with rare and beautiful treasures’ (Prov. 24.3–​4). Similarly informed are the Rarohiko (computer) paintings of 2010, in which traditionally inspired designs are incorporated into Modernist abstract compositions. In these works, George uses the computer, an interface for information, to create a more universal metaphor for knowledge and its exchange. Works such as Rarohiko #10 (Figure 2.16) reference the simplified qualities of the laptop screen, reflected and replicated in the way that traditional Māori designs are repeated in the wharenui. The minimalist effect also leaves the geometric shapes open to interpretation; they

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Figure 2.16  Darryn George, Rarohiko #10, 2010.

could be flat walls with inset walls, windows or doors, circuit boards, storage units or even air vents. George is quite happy that his works retain an element of ambiguity so that viewers can project their own interpretations onto them. At Auckland’s Gow Langsford Gallery in 2010, Rarohiko shared exhibition space with another of George’s series, Countdown. These series did not relate conceptually but played off each other in terms of scale; however, the conceptual framework of the Countdown works once again shows the importance of McCahon for George’s work. Rather than illustrating the biblical narrative of the Way of Sorrows (or Stations of the Cross) pictorially, McCahon painted a sequence of numbers, each signifying a stage of Christ’s journey.32 Similarly, in Countdown (Figure 2.17), George painted numerals; the series counts down to zero, recalling the artist’s childhood Sunday School days and ‘the countdown song’ which counted down to zero, with the lyrics pointing to the return of Christ. George’s selection of text, ārepa (alpha) and ōmeka (omega), references the appellation of Jesus in Rev. 21.6: ‘I am the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end.’ Countdown combines numerals with Māori-​inspired designs, and the works are grouped by footers of Māori translations of symbols from

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Figure 2.17  Darryn George, Countdown, 2010.

the Greek alphabet. In this way, the series can be likened to McCahon’s iconic painting Numerals (1965), which incorporates Roman and Arabic numerals as well as koru (spiral or looped) forms. Despite being colour blind, George admits that as a young artist he was always looking at fashion magazines and mail order clothing catalogues that included colour codes. He would also strip out paint charts and colour combinations. This was a harbinger of his creative and intellectual activity, an incessant exploration of materials, sources, patterns and ideas that has characterized his working practice for more than twenty years. However, the foundation on which all this is built is George’s profound and enduring Christian faith. For George, faith is a way of life, summed up perfectly by the apostle Paul in the book of Acts (17.28): ‘For in him we live and move and have our being’.

Notes 1. The term “Pākehā” is a Māori word typically used to refer to New Zealanders of non-​Māori and non-​Polynesian heritage.

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2. Jonathan Mane-​Wheoki, Tipuna (Melbourne: Span Galleries, 2004), n.p. 3. Unless otherwise specified, all opinions and quotations attributed to Darryn George were expressed in conversations with the author between August 2014 and January 2016. 4. Pop art emerged in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States and Britain, drawing inspiration from sources in popular and commercial culture such as advertising, Hollywood movies and pop music. Op art was a major development of painting in the 1960s that used geometric forms to create optical effects. For further information, see Tate gallery website, available online: http://​www.tate.org.uk/​learn/​online-​resources/​glossary. 5. Felicity Milburn, Hiko! New Energies in Māori Art (Christchurch: Robert McDougall Art Gallery, 1999), n.p. 6. Moana Tipa, ‘Unfolding Language’, Chrysalis Seed 25 (November 2006): 10–​11. 7. Christopher Moore, ‘Arena of Abstract Art’, The Press (28 June 2000). 8. Kōwhaiwhai are painted scroll ornamentation commonly used on meeting house rafters. Tukutuku is an ornamental lattice work used particularly between carvings around the walls of meeting houses. 9. Adam Gifford, ‘New Ways to Tell Old Tales’, New Zealand Herald, 13 April 2005. 10. De Stijl was a circle of Dutch abstract artists who promoted a style of art based on a strict geometry of horizontals and verticals. For further information, see Tate gallery website, available online: http://​www.tate.org.uk/​learn/​online-​ resources/​glossary. 11. The Bible was translated into Māori in the 1820s, paralleling the early conversion of the tribes of northern New Zealand to Christianity. 12. Deirdre Brown, ‘Darryn George in Conversation with Deirdre Brown’, in Deirdre Brown and Lara Strongman, Darryn George (Christchurch: Mihi Publishers, 2010), 107. 13. Lara Strongman, ‘Conversations with the World’, in Brown and Strongman, Darryn George, 102. 14. The ridegepole (or tāhuhu) is the large wooden beam that runs down the length of the wharenui roof. It is commonly understood to be the ‘backbone’ of the ancestor who is represented by the wharenui. 15. Tā moko is permanent body and face marking. 16. The Rena oil spill is considered to be New Zealand’s worst maritime environmental disaster. It was caused by the container ship Rena running aground on the Astrolabe reef off the coast of Tauranga in October 2011. 17. David Eggleton, ‘Wharenui: Notes on Recent Paintings by Darryn George’, Landfall 224 (November 2012): 187. 18. Darryn George, talking about his painting Atua #4, Museum of New Zealand Arts Te Papa website, available online: http://​arts.tepapa.govt.nz/​on-​the-​wall/​ atua-​4/​5897.

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19. Pulse was not the only large temporary work that George designed for a specific space. Other examples include Hoani Kaiiriiri (2004, City Gallery, Wellington) and Rehita #3 (2009, Te Tuhi gallery, Auckland). Moreover, George has completed a number of projects on a comparable scale that are site-​specific, permanent works. Among the most significant of these is his nod to Marcel Duchamp, The Large Glass, a 17 x 2.8 metre work in PVC laminate on Smartglass, commissioned for Deutsche Bank, New Zealand, in 2007. 20. The scale and timeframe for this project precluded George from doing the painting himself, and so he effectively became designer and project manager, employing professional painters led by George Barnes of Miller Studios, a sign-​writing and shop-​fitting company based in Dunedin. 21. Brown and Strongman, Darryn George, 101. 22. Gregory O’Brien, Bro Town Boogie Woogie (Auckland: FHE Galleries, 2005), 10. 23. This analogy was made by Lara Strongman in Brown and Strongman, Darryn George, 101. 24. Ibid., 109. 25. George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 154. 26. Eggleton, ‘Wharenui’, 188. 27. Light was a principal motif in McCahon’s paintings; at least forty-​six of his known works feature the word ‘light’ in either the title or the inscription. There are references to McCahon’s use of light as a symbol throughout Marja Bloem and Martin Browne, Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith (Auckland: Craig Potton Publishing; Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 2002). 28. For further discussion of Barnett Newman, see Ellyn Childs Allison (ed.), Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné (New York: The Barnett Newman Foundation; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 29. For a history of this project, see Shelley Bishop-​Jahnke, ‘Seismic Activity: Darryn George’s Project for Scape 2010’, Art New Zealand 138 (Winter 2011): 30. 30. The irony of this was brought to my attention by Jacqueline Aust, who was the research assistant for this chapter. 31. The use of goat’s hair is specified in a number of sources, including Eugene Carpenter and Michael A. Grisanti, ‘‫’קַֺש‬, in NIDOTTE 3.1270. The dark colour is also suggested in texts such as Isa. 50.3 and Rev. 6.12. 32. Without ever specifically illustrating the Stations of the Cross, McCahon referenced them repeatedly through the metaphor of the numbers one to fourteen, for example, Colin McCahon, The Song of the Shining Cuckoo (1974). McCahon’s symbolic series, Numerals One to Ten, dates from 1958. His 1965 Numerals is a series of hardboard panels numbering one to ten.

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Bibliography Allison, Ellyn Childs (ed.). Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné. New York: The Barnett Newman Foundation; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Bishop-​Jahnke, Shelley. ‘Seismic Activity: Darryn George’s Project for Scape 2010’. Art New Zealand 138 (Winter 2011): 30–​3. Bloem, Marja, and Martin Browne. Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith. Auckland: Craig Potton Publishing; Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 2002. Brown, Deirdre, and Lara Strongman. Darryn George. Christchurch: Mihi Publishers, 2010. Carpenter, Eugene, and Michael A. Grisanti. ‘‫’שַֺק‬, in NIDOTTE 3.1270. Eggleton, David. ‘Wharenui: Notes on Recent Paintings by Darryn George’. Landfall 224 (November 2012): 187–​9. Ferguson, George. Signs and Symbols in Christian Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966. Gifford, Adam. ‘New Ways to Tell Old Tales’. New Zealand Herald, 13 April, 2005. Gow Langsford Gallery. Profile of Darryn George. Available online: http://​www. gowlangsfordgallery.co.nz/​artists/​darryn-​george. Mane-​Wheoki, Jonathan. Tipuna. Melbourne: Span Galleries, 2004. Milburn, Felicity Hiko! New Energies in Māori Art. Christchurch: Robert McDougall Art Gallery, 1999. Moore, Christopher. ‘Arena of Abstract Art’. The Press, 28 June 2000. Museum of New Zealand, Arts Te Papa. ‘Darryn George: Maori Abstraction –​Atua #4’. Available online: http://​arts.tepapa.govt.nz/​on-​the-​wall/​atua-​4/​5897. O’Brien, Gregory. Bro Town Boogie Woogie. Auckland: FHE Galleries, 2005. Tipa, Moana. ‘Unfolding Language’. Chrysalis Seed 25 (November 2006): 10–​11.

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The Absurdly Ideal Jesus of Reg Mombassa Roland Boer

Is Reg Mombassa merely a purveyor of popular or mass art, utilizing the mechanisms of commercialization with distinct entrepreneurial skill? Or has he tapped into a dimension of the Australian –​and very masculine –​psyche, subtly overturning what some assume it to be? Or is he an artist who  –​to gloss Theodor Adorno –​reveals the ugly underside of iconic Australia by challenging the very concept itself? I suggest the answer to all three questions is affirmative to some degree, and the following argument deals with each in turn, after some observations on method. In doing so, I examine each answer until it yields its limits and opens out into the next. But first, a few biographical details: Reg Mombassa (Chris O’Doherty) was born in New Zealand in 1951, moving to Australia with his parents in 1969. Primarily an artist, Mombassa formed the band Mental as Anything with some fellow art students. Unexpected success led to the band turning professional, but eventually Mombassa decided to stop touring with the band in light of the increasing demands of his art, especially from his connections with the surf brand Mambo. He did form a smaller band, Dogfart, with his brother, although they choose when and where to play and when to record new albums.

Method: Adorno and negative dialectics My method is drawn from Theodor Adorno, not so much from his observations on actual popular culture or the ‘culture industry’1 but from a core feature of what has been called non-​conceptual philosophy.2 Philosophy traditionally

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focuses on key concepts: being (ontology), immanence, transcendence, epistemology, space, time, truth, reality, reason and so on. These concepts are assumed –​in traditional philosophy –​to connect with reality; there is an identity between the concept and reality. By contrast, Adorno attempts to develop a philosophy that is non-​conceptual. He realizes that he cannot avoid concepts completely, especially when one uses words. So he seeks to show how concepts undermine themselves, in order to show that a concept is not identical with its object. This entails developing a dialectical approach that pushes one side of a contradiction until it reveals –​sweating and exhausted –​its opposite. To put it slightly differently, such a dialectic seeks to reveal what is blocked or left out in order to make the concept function as a concept.3 Let me give the example of reason, expounded in Adorno’s text co-​authored with Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, which remains among the most thorough criticisms of the nature of European philosophy and culture.4 The text begins with this sentence: ‘Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth radiates under the sign of disaster triumphant.’5 How has this happened? How has the progress of modern science, medicine and industry, which promised to liberate people from ignorance, disease and hard labour, created a world in which people willingly submit to fascism, deliberately practice genocide and produce weapons of mass destruction? The book sets out to show how, by going all the way back to the mythical foundations of ‘Western’ culture among the ancient Greeks. The more enlightened and ‘civilized’ (or ‘citified’  –​the original meaning of the term) we become, the more barbaric we become. The exacerbation of one entails the exacerbation of its dialectical other. So if we examine a concept closely enough, it will reveal what is left out and blocked. But why does Adorno undertake this task? The function of a concept is to connect with a reality outside it. This is what he calls ‘identity’ –​ the identity of a concept and its object, indeed the identity or unity of a word with an object. The reason (that word!) is that when human thought makes this identity or unity between thought and an object, it imposes that identity on the object. It forces such identity, ignoring and suppressing what is different and diverse. Further, when a unity of concept and object happens, we have reification: the turning of concepts into things, as well as the turning of human

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beings into things, into objects. Reification, Verdingliching, he argues (following Georg Lukács6 and ultimately Marx), is a constituent feature of capitalism and the cultures suffused by it. Everything may become a commodity, a thing. I speak not only of smartphones or motor cars or clothes, but also of water, animals, human beings and even emotions like love. Even love is for sale –​it has become a commodity, an object, a thing. And at its heart –​as Marx showed in Capital –​this process of reification, of turning concepts into commodities and things, is deeply irrational, for it relies on a near-​mystical fetishism.7 Such a brief outline can hardy do justice to the complexity of Adorno’s approach, but I will seek to apply it to my analysis of Mombassa’s visual presentation of ‘Australian Jesus’.

The full hog of commercialization The first step is to focus on the extensive commercialization of Mombassa’s art as a whole. In 1986, he signed up with Mambo, which was established a couple of years earlier and became one of the most successful Australian surf-​wear companies.8 One iconic label has served to produce another; or rather, the two logos –​Mambo and Mombassa –​have enhanced each other’s status. Once with Mambo, Mombassa began to design the artwork for a series of quirky t-​shirts, which have since become collectors’ items. These depicted everyday Australian life with a twist: a dog farting (itself now an icon), beach scenes, suburban living and so on.9 Established and with a more than steady income from his art, Mombassa has branched out to design posters, postcards, paintings, tapestries and murals –​for Greenpeace, the Rock Eisteddfod, Circus Oz, the Sydney Opera House Trust, Redfern Legal Aid (in Sydney), the Wilderness Society, Westmead Children’s Hospital in Sydney and The Powerhouse Museum.10 The names of some of these organizations should already indicate another dimension to his work, especially Redfern Legal Aid (mainly for Indigenous Australians), Greenpeace and the Wilderness Society. I will return to this dimension of his work later in my argument. Commercial success has entailed that Mombassa’s work is held by major galleries and private collections in Australia, New Zealand and worldwide. In October 2013, a gigantic mural created by Mombassa greeted visitors coming to celebrate the fortieth

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anniversary of the Sydney Opera House. Later that year, he became the creative ambassador for Sydney’s New Year’s Eve festivities. But what is the commercial niche he has carved for his art, let  alone for the wrinkled, big-​nosed, long-​haired, beanie-​wearing Mombassa himself? It is certainly not comprised of the smooth and brightly coloured images of another contemporary Australian artist, Ken Done, which can easily hang on walls in the United States and Europe.11 Nor is it of the same type as Steve Parish’s photography, which provides highly refined images of romanticized Australian wildlife and landscape for international consumption –​of the sort that one might find in tourist brochures and coffee-​table books.12 Mombassa’s niche is rather different. As Mombassa explains in one of his rare comments on his work, he finds the sources of his inspiration in the wind, semi-​professional birthday clowns, heavy machinery and the behaviour of domestic animals.13 Or, as the Mambo website puts it, ‘Reg Mombassa is a musician, painter, writer, poet, humanist, sage, dispenser of arcane wisdom, buggerer of sacred cows and much loved national treasure.’14 Indeed, he is widely acclaimed as the world’s greatest t-​shirt artist. At this point, we may be tempted to dismiss Mombassa as simply a form of crass commercialization, as a producer and product of the mass culture by which capitalism dupes us all –​a clear case of ideology as false consciousness. This would be close to Adorno’s argument concerning popular music, which masks its commodity form by claiming to be innovative (itself part of the commodity), makes claims to primitiveness that are nothing less than pure ideology and claims freedom from conventional society in only an illusory fashion.15 The catch is that Mombassa does not really seek such an approach: to be acclaimed as the world’s greatest t-​shirt artist is not a particularly great claim in the (I am tempted to say snobbish) conventions of the art world.

Australian ‘psyche’? Instead, let me tack in another direction and suggest that Mombassa picks up what are regarded by some as key features of the ‘Australian psyche’. This may be described in terms of the ‘larrikin’,16 who dislikes authority structures, questions them when possible and does his own thing. This mythological creature

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is embodied from time to time in other characters (and I  choose the word deliberately), perhaps the most well known being Paul Hogan, as both Paul Hogan himself and as Crocodile Dundee. Mombassa as the ‘buggerer of sacred cows’ fits into this larger mythical tradition. Or it may be described in terms of crap detection. Australians are supposed to be good at sorting out shit from clay, at discerning when someone is full of bullshit and pretension. My way of describing this feature of the ‘Australian psyche’ should indicate my hesitations over such a feature, if not the very idea of that ‘psyche’. Before I  return to my hesitations, let me focus on what may be called Mombassa’s ‘absurd idealism’, especially in relation to Jesus.17 Although the subjects of his art range over multiple topics  –​from dogs farting to quirky landscapes of the everyday –​Mombassa’s ‘Australian Jesus’ embodies many of the key themes of his art. I begin with a few of the more mundane examples. This Jesus originally appeared in a suit and tie, sometimes with a cape. Initially, he engages in everyday ‘Australian pastimes’, such as hitchhiking on a quiet road in the countryside in Australian Jesus Hitchhiking Near Sofala (Early Morning) (2006) or Australian Jesus Hitchhiking on the F3 (2007).18 He shares a beer in Australian Jesus Counselling a Diplomat (2007), reads to a Kanga-​ Emu in Reading a Book after the Fire (2009) or perhaps even inspires the artist himself in Mambo Faith (1995). Soon enough, Jesus enjoys himself in ‘typical’ suburban landscapes –​albeit with a twist. Thus, in Barbeque (2008) he stands in a backyard beside a barbeque, with the Sydney Harbour Bridge, suburban home and Opera House (these will become standard items in many of the paintings). Yet, an oversized fly eats from the barbeque and an almost alien dog barks at the fly. As in many appearances, Jesus holds a book in his hands, from which he seems to be reading. A  comparable iconic image with a twist is the painting Beach Holiday with Space Beer and Peace Wand (2009). In this case, a dog catches a cricket ball next to a suited Jesus on the beach. In the background is a barbeque with animals roasting sausages on a massive flame before a suburban house. The Opera House sits behind them on a hill. Jesus himself wears thongs (jandals or flip-​flops), carries a slab (case) of ‘Space Beer’ and a ‘space wand,’ which turns out to be a dove on a stick. Once again, in Australian Jesus Helps Noah with His Ark (2009), iconic items appear, with the ark sitting in Sydney Harbour as the Opera House, Harbour Bridge and a couple of suburban houses begin to

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sink beneath the waves. Jesus writes undecipherable characters in a book as he oversees the ark filling with possums, platypi, wombats, sheep, cows and a kangaroo carrying a football. Again, the Opera House, bridge and suburban houses appear in Australian Jesus Delivering Presents (2007), with Jesus now taking on the persona of Santa Claus, his utility (a type of small ‘pick-​up’ truck) pulled by a koala and a kangaroo. Iconic too is Jesus at the Football (1996), not so much in terms of images but the event itself. The football is question is one of an olive shape (as the Chinese describe rugby league). Now Jesus multiplies five meat pies and two warm beers for the hungry and thirsty crowd. As the text in the image puts it: ‘And the beer was cold. It was good.’ I close this initial collection with two images, the first a painting called Nativity:  Birth of the Australian Jesus (2004). In this case, the first female figure appears in the series (a rare occurrence as we shall see). Mary sits in Bethlehem Caravan Park, holding a baby in her hands. In the background we find the familiar Opera House and Harbour Bridge, but now with a Christmas tree and caravan. A spaceship appears, perhaps suggesting Jesus’ other-​worldly origin. Three ‘wise animals’ bear gifts: a chicken gives a meat pie and chips, a koala proffers a football and a kangaroo presents a case of ‘Asylum Bitter’. Or rather, four animals appear, for a fly also offers the gift of a ball. With the ‘Asylum Bitter’, a new note creeps into the art, to which I will return in a moment. But the Jesus image that captures the deployment of icons best is an early sculpture simply called Australian Jesus (1998). A haloed if somewhat weary-​looking Jesus is surrounding by a whole collections of icons: a thong or jandal (flip-​flop), a beer can, a meat pie, a beach and an FJ-​Holden Ute with a cross thrown in the back like a surfboard. Such a multiplication of conventional images intensifies the iconic nature of Mombassa’s work. The curiously smooth, if not monochromatic style of the paintings seems to add to this impression. Yet, the figures are somewhat stiff, frozen in movement, suggesting the inflexibility of such icons. But I am interested in the quirky features of the ‘Australian Jesus’ paintings. A spaceship appears, or a monster fly or humanoid animals at a barbeque, a dove on a stick, an alien dog, a kanga-​emu, even a third eye on a baby Jesus. At one level these twists tap into the ‘larrikin’ theme I noted earlier,19 but for all its mild subversion, this is a white, masculine Jesus –​as the larrikin myth asserts. Tough Australian men drink beer, usually in slabs; they have barbeques in

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the backyards of suburban houses and tell stories taking the piss out of others, while often voicing a comfortable racism –​paradoxically, because they are now the minority in Australia. However, if this is a Jesus for Australia’s modern times, then those times seem to be out of kilter. Something is not quite right with this concept of Australia. Now the monster fly, spaceship and humanoid animals at the barbeque take on a slightly different hue. This smooth, iconic beachside or suburban life with its telltale icons has a slightly macabre tenor.

Unwinding the concept This macabre dimension gains momentum with some of Mombassa’s later works, so much so that it begins to resemble a form of Adorno’s negative dialectics, in which the concept is subjected to an unravelling so that it reveals what is excluded in terms of its dialectical other. And this other is far less savoury and enlightened than one might expect. Let us consider a few more images of the ‘Australian Jesus’. In some of the images I  discussed earlier, Jesus has a third eye. At some point, he seems to have travelled ‘East’ and gained extra insight. But now –​in the painting Australian Jesus with the Golden Motorbike (2002) –​Jesus roars back to Australia on a bicycle. The quirky iconic landscape has changed. The Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge may still be there, but the skyline is dominated by belching chimneys and a red sun. The mini-​series of this bikie-​ Jesus becomes ever grimmer, with dead trees as smokestacks, billowing chimneys and a bug-​eyed dog chasing him as he is Skirting the Rim of Hell (2003 and 2004). What that rim is remains to be seen, but before we do, let me turn to a new dimension: Jesus’s social conscience. As the world seems to be on its way to hell, the new Jesus with a third eye begins to gain a sense of social justice, reflected in Mombassa’s work for Redfern Legal Aid and the Wilderness Society I  mentioned earlier. For instance, in Australian Jesus Welcomes the Boat People (2002), Jesus sits astride a white horse in a stained-​glass window style painting, welcoming refugees and ‘asylum seekers’ victimized in a hypocritical policy by Australian governments for the past decade or more. (I write ‘hypocritical’ since this

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victimization takes place in the midst of a continued and massive immigration policy, encouraging up to 200,000 people a year to move to Australia.) Further, in Sermon: Australian Jesus Addresses the Bigots (2005), Jesus still has a halo, wears a suit and is in the suburbs, signalled by the telltale house and tree. In his sermon, he says:  ‘Homophobic bullies are not good Christians. Find yourself a new collective noun.’ But who are the homophobic bullies? Perhaps such a representation appears in Australian Jesus Shows a Book to a Captured Demon (2004). We seem to be in the countryside, or at the edge of suburbia. An iconic utility –​of an FJ Holden vintage –​is two-​thirds in the picture. In the back of the utility is a half-​animal half-​human figure. It has hooves, a penis, humped spine, big ears, forked tongue, eyes in its head and on its hairy bum, breasts with prominent nipples, a beer gut or pregnant belly and black stars in its eyes. Is this demon a form of the bigot to whom Jesus was preaching earlier, especially in light of the fact that it stands in the back of a Ute? Is this the ugly and very masculine underside of iconic Australia? Or is it really male at all, but some form of androgynous creature in an effort to capture the ugly side of bigotry and violence in men and women? In light of such demonic bigotry, Jesus also suffers in a series of depictions. The first is Station of the Cross no. 3: Australian Jesus with Telegraph Pole (after Gibson) (2008). Surrounded by angry people with pig faces, Mombassa’s Jesus is deeply gashed and has large globules of blood pouring from the wounds. He is barely able to prop himself up on one knee, crushed as he is beneath the heavy pole that lies across his back and its snaking wires. On a rough crossbeam are written the words, ‘King of the Australians’. Here is violence and destruction, brought about through insatiable industrialization and ‘development’, weighing upon a Jesus who earlier seemed to calm and heal. Perhaps the most arresting images are a couple of works in which Jesus engages a ‘maggot-​infested business horse’. These come towards the end of the Business Horse series of the first decade of the twenty-​first century, in which an evil-​ looking, business-​suited and chain-​smoking horse pursues profit at all costs. He cares little for environmental, social and personal costs, so that eventually, in the later paintings, he becomes maggot infested and bleeding. At last, Jesus appears and attempts to read to him, although the reason is not clear. Is it too late? Can the horse’s ways still be turned around? We may situate these starker images in light of The Temptation (Hunter Valley) from 1998. It is an image of

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the Fall, set in a landscape now industrialized, polluted and bulldozed. A big-​ eared serpent, which is twisted around a pole, gives a beer-​swilling Adam a gun, while he holds a toaster out of Eve’s reach. Now the violence is visited upon both human beings and the environment. Indeed, the environment has already appeared in a number of paintings discussed earlier. Others focus directly on this theme. Is it perhaps Jesus who brings about this violence? The Santa Claus of Happy Climate Change Christmas (1992) looks a little like Jesus, except that now he is muscled, with scars or stretch marks. Christmas has become, paradoxically, a winter scene –​invoking a northern hemisphere Christmas as a world out-​of-​joint. Snow-​covered icons appear (the usual suspects), but some are now ammunition fired from a small field gun. A koala, a football, another ball and a skull are blasted out of the new toy gun of Santa ‘Muscle Claws’. Less ambiguous are the flood images, such as Australian Jesus with Eyes Popped Out (2011) in which the face of Jesus has flood waters entering a gaping mouth, his eyes popped out in disbelief at what has happened to the world. The trees in the background are denuded of foliage. Our Australian Jesus has become a grim figure. He may have tried to address the bigots, destructive economic policies and environmental destruction, but violence soon follows. Indeed, Mombassa has pointed out that what continues to shock him is human violence, one against another, but especially by males. At times, such violence appears in horrific bursts.20 Many of his art works manifest an almost demonological violence, with troubling characters as aliens, snarling, halfway between machine and animal. Initially, Jesus may seem to reinforce iconic Australia, but, as I noted earlier, even these images hint at an uglier underside to what is supposed to be ‘Australia’. Soon enough, that underside becomes the dominant theme, with violence, bigotry and large-​scale environmental destruction affecting Jesus himself. In theological terms, we might speak of a shift from the Jesus of a mild resurrection to one of the stark cross. In order to understand what is happening with the Australian Jesus, let me return to Adorno’s negative dialectics, in which he attempts to develop a non-​ conceptual philosophy. It may well be described in Mombassa’s own words as buggering sacred cows or, in terms of the artistic volume that includes his work, co-​authored with Anna Johnson, Art Irritates Life.21 The cows in question may be seen not merely as the icons, assumptions and myths of cultural identity, but also as the very concepts that Adorno and Mombassa set out to question. These

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concepts begin to reveal what is excluded, what is left out from the effort at identity between concept and object. In order to develop his negative dialectics, Adorno draws on the biblical ban on images from Exod. 20.4 and Deut. 5.8: ‘It is the fact that the prohibition on graven images [das Bilderverbot] that occupies a position of central importance in the religions that believe in salvation, that this prohibition extends into the ideas and the most sublime ramifications of thought.’22 This extraordinarily fertile idea would infuse Adorno’s thought in what may be called ‘theological suspicion’.23 Indeed, the ban becomes nothing less than the ‘the prohibition on invoking falsity as God, the finite as the infinite, the lie as truth’.24 We see it in Adorno’s effort to produce a non-​conceptual philosophy, or rather unlocking the non-​conceptual through the conceptual; his central category of the non-​identical; his refusal to speculate upon or represent utopia; his (appropriately) incomplete attempt at an aesthetic theory; the search for the possibility of resistance through modern music; his thoughts on the personality cult and secularized theology. The relevance of Adorno’s non-​ conceptual philosophy for analysing Mombassa’s work should be obvious. The iconic Australian images, replete with beer cans, beaches, backyards, Utes and footballs, seek an identity with a calm and comfortable Australia. They become in a sense the idols of Australian life. But when Mombassa pushes such icons, they begin to reveal what has been left out, what the identity between idol and object really means. Now bigotry, xenophobia, violence, scapegoating and environmental destruction emerge. Indeed, the curious twists and quirkiness of the depictions of the Australian Jesus with which I began (the spider at the barbeque, the ‘Space Beer’, ‘space stick’ and so on) now show their true face, for the comfortable Australia can force such an identity only through the contradictions of that identity. The clearest depiction of this dynamic appears in Australian Jesus Heaven and Hell (1996). Using bowdlerized Latin text, it has a two triptychs reminiscent of traditional Christian versions. On the left are depictions of ‘heaven’, which are what we would expect by now:  an Australian suburban backyard with barbeque, although we also have Jesus mowing a lawn and greeting a winged angel holding a baby. On the right are depictions of hell, with demons shooting and hacking a hapless man, or shoving him into the mouth of a beast. In the middle is a suited, caped and bare-​footed Jesus with a third eye and halo. He sits with one hand raised and another pointing towards the earth. Above him drift

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a television, football, toaster and beer can. He seems weary in his effort to keep hell from heaven, but the point is clear: the concept of a comfortable Australian life cannot exist without the reality of demonic violence and exclusion.

Redemption? Mombassa thus reveals in his paintings the reality that cannot be excluded, the barbarism that lies just beneath the surface of apparent civilization, indeed the impossibility of the idolatry of Australian life. In fact, I suggest he hints that the jingoistic claims to some ‘Anglosphere’ identity as an outpost of ‘the West’ have unravelled. Even more, the increasing grimness of the paintings may be read as an absence of clear identity, while the imagined community of Australia searches for a new one. But is there a note of redemption in Mombassa’s ‘Australian Jesus’? Initially, his image of the Walking Solar Powered Jesus Bottle (2006) may suggest a way out, especially in light of Jesus’ cruciform shape. The environment’s suffering is also that of Jesus. This ‘Jesus-​bottle’ reaches out to the sun with a cord, surrounded by a landscape on the verge of environmental collapse. Yet this is merely the beginning of a whole series of solar-​powered Jesus-​bottle images. As they progress, they become ever grimmer. The suburban landscape is festooned with dead trees and a red sun. Blood falls from the wounds where Jesus’s hands should be on a cruciform body. Smoke begins to billow from the top of his head. Perhaps Jesus can find refuge inside one of the houses, where we find him in Solar Powered Jesus Bottle with Sustainable Furniture (Potato Couch and Lamp That Is a Banana) (2008). Yet through the window of this house we see a tank firing, factories billowing and another house burning. Eventually, the houses are replaced by Meccano frames, as though there is no protection inside either. Even Jesus seems unable to bring about redemption, since humans are idiots. Perhaps redemption lies elsewhere, as in the Waterland series from 2009–​ 10. In these images, Jesus stands, still in suit and cape and reading a book (the Bible?), up to his crotch in water. The initial Waterland picture is overloaded with familiar Australian icons:  Opera House, Harbour Bridge, suburban houses, Hills Hoist (rotary clothesline), cricket stumps and a football. Added here is an animal-​form guitar and four crows sitting on a telephone

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wire. The picture invokes simultaneously the story of Noah and the Flood, the propensity for floods in Australia, and the dangers of global warming. But as the series progresses, the water begins to recede, with more of the buildings, cricket stumps, telephone pole and Hills Hoist showing. Notably, the formerly dead trees have green shoots, and there are more of them. The final Waterland image is relocated to Melbourne, with its telltale tram and St. Kilda amusement park. The water seems to have receded further; one of the trees has grown. Is this a sign of hope, of redemption even? Perhaps not, since not all is well in this picture. One of the trees is now dead and others have gone. The telephone pole has become a high-​tension electricity construction, the planks suggest renewed industry and a car drives across a bridge. Only two of the crows are left. The message is ambiguous. Even faced with the real threat of destruction, human beings do not seem to learn. Redemption, it seems, is not to be found here either. But Mombassa offers one other ambiguous option. Throughout his work, he constantly reflects on the ubiquity of male-​on-​male violence. Few and far between are his depictions of female forms (with the exceptions of Mary in Bethlehem caravan park, Eve with Adam and perhaps an androgynous demon). Of course, Mombassa risks essentializing masculinity as violent, but he uses it both for the Adornoesque buggering of sacred cows and –​possibly –​for a hint of redemption. The catch with focusing on male-​on-​male violence is that it risks excluding the speaker of such words, or rather, the painter of such images. Not so with Mombassa, for in a series of self-​portraits, we find a curious identification with Jesus. In one, a reworking of Australian Jesus in the Suburbs, Jesus has lost his beard, and his hair has grown darker and longer. Now it is called Landscape with Book Learning (1997), but the figure is clearly Mombassa himself. Even the dog in the foreground is shaped out of a lead guitar –​Mombassa’s favoured instrument. A few other paintings come even closer. Three self-​portraits are of interest:  Self-​Portrait with a Beard and Plastic Ring (2009), Dog Face (2010) with a severed head in the shape of a dog and Self-​Portrait with Spots and Veins (2006). The first echoes very closely the bearded Jesus of the other paintings, with a golden ring floating above him. The second points to the issue of violence and an ugly underside within oneself, while the third plays up what are normally regarded as ‘ugly’ features –​large ears, lanky hair, spotty face, protruding veins, lines and dark

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circles under his eyes. Yet behind the head is the faint but clear outline of a halo. Obviously, a sense of the artist’s vocation emerges here; it is a decidedly quirky appropriation. If we are tempted to accuse Mombassa of messianic pretensions, such an impression is soon dispelled, for in each of these images, Jesus is curiously powerless. I close with a final image that suggests a possible form of ambiguous redemption: Australian Jesus: Not Afraid to Do a Woman’s Work (2004) comes closest of all. In this case, a naked, bearded and hairy-​bellied Jesus stands in a large clam-​shell by the beach. Reminiscent of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1486), this Jesus has long, reddish hair with which he covers his crotch. The other tries to cover his man-​boobs. On either side is the cottage by the beach and the ubiquitous Utility with a cross in the back. How might this image be understood, with its feminized male or perhaps masculinized female figure that has homosexual undertones? Some have suggested it fails on most counts, being blasphemous for these undertones and, at the same time, its slighting of feminism.25 It also risks a bad form of essentialism (assuming that good forms exists), in that the feminine is believed to be soft, non-​violent and peaceful. If men are to overcome violence and bigotry, they need to get in touch with their anima –​to gloss Jung.26 Even so, the approach risks being facile, as if an occasional mopping of the floor or washing the dishes makes a huge difference. The hint of redemption is difficult to discern, but it seems to suggest another dimension to human existence may well be possible. What does Mombassa think? He is not given to making comments about his work (the one I noted earlier being a rare exception). Refreshingly, he is not seduced by the artist’s desire to explain his or her own work, for he is typically understated in interviews. After all, as he points out, most artists are idiots, so it is unwise to listen to what they say.

Notes 1. The main studies have usefully been gathered in Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991). 2. The main text here is formidable: Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (1966; repr., New York: Seabury, 1973); Theodor W. Adorno, Negative

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3.

4.

5 . 6.

7.

8.

Roland Boer Dialektik, Gesammelte Schriften 6 (1966; repr., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003). But see also his much more accessible comments in the lectures given at the time he wrote this text: Theodor W. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/​1966, trans. Rodney Livingstone (2003; repr., Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 57, 62, 68–​75, 94–​5, 185–​6; Theodor W. Adorno, Vorlesung über Negative Dialektik: Fragmente zur Vorlesung 1965/​66, Nachgelassenen Schriften (2003; repr., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), 87, 95, 102–​13, 139–​40, 229–​31. He also comments frequently on the need to avoid philosophical systems in Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics, 22–​43; Adorno, Vorlesung über Negative Dialektik, 40–​54. See the excellent studies by Susan Buck-​Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: The Free Press, 1977); Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990). Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (1947; repr., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente, Gesammelte Schriften 3 (1947; repr., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003). Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (1968; repr., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 83–​ 223; Georg Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, Georg Lukács Werke 2 (Neuwied und Berlin: Hermann Luchterhand, 1968), 257–​397. For a detailed exposition of Marx’s complex developments of the category of the fetish, until it becomes the core of capitalism itself –​Kapitalfetisch –​see Roland Boer, ‘Kapitalfetisch: “The Religion of Everyday Life”’, International Critical Thought 1, no. 4 (2011): 416–​26. Scholarly work on Mambo, let alone Mombassa, is rare. I have been able to find one book, which is really a coffee-​table study full of images: Murray Waldron, The Mind and Times of Reg Mombassa (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2009). Other studies focus largely on Mambo itself, either in terms of the characteristic ‘larrikin’ theme or Mambo’s designing of athletes’ uniforms for the 2000 Sydney Olympics. See Susie Khamis, ‘Mambo Justice: An Unnnatural Alliance?’ Altitude 4 (2004), accessed 30 January 2016: https://​thealtitudejournal.files.wordpress.com/​2011/​ 05/​khamis.pdf; Federico Boni, ‘Mamboing Matilda: Surf Life-​Style T-​Shirts and Representations of Australian Cultural Identity’, in Imagined Australia: Reflections around the Reciprocal Production of Identity between Australia and Europe, ed. Renata Summo-​O’Connell (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), 201–​14; Jess Berry, ‘A

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Uniform Approach? Designing Australian National Identity at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games’, Journal of Design History 26, no. 1 (2013): 86–​103. 9. Samples of Mombassa’s art, including his t-​shirts and posters, can be found on his official website Reg Mombassa, available online: http://​regmombassa.com/​ tagged/​art. 10. To view some of Mombassa’s art projects, see also the Mambo website archives page, available online: http://​www.mambo-​world.com/​tag/​reg-​mombassa/​. 11. See Janet McKenzie, The Art of Ken Done (St. Leonards: Craftsman House, 2002). 12. For instance, Steve Parish, Photograph Australia with Steve Parish (Archerfield: Steve Parish Publishing, 2003). 13. See the official Reg Mombassa website for his biography and examples of his work, available online: http://​regmombassa.com/​biography. 14. Interview ‘Reg Mombassa @ Semi Permanent’, at Mambo World website, available online: http://​www.mambo-​world.com/​reg-​mombassa-​semi-​ permanent/​. 15. See especially Robert Witkin, Adorno on Music (London: Routledge, 1998), 160–​80. 16. The larrikin theme is part of (masculine) Australian folklore, designating a disregard for authority, individualism, good-​hearted toughness, boisterousness and an ability to enjoy life. 17. Murray Waldron, The Mind and Times of Reg Mombassa (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2009). 18. Due to copyright restrictions, I cannot reproduce the images here. However, a search on the internet for the titles of the paintings I mention will locate the item in question. 19. See Kel Richards, The Story of Australian English (Sydney: Newsouth, 2015), 124–​38. 20. See the brief interview at National Portrait Gallery website: Chris O’Doherty, ‘Self Portrait with Spots and Veins’, National Portrait Gallery, available online: http://​www.portrait.gov.au/​site/​Reg_​Mombassa.php. 21. Anna Johnson and Reg Mombassa, Art Irritates Life (Sydney: Mambo Graphics, 1994). 22. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics, 26; Adorno, Vorlesung über Negative Dialektik, 46. 23. Roland Boer, Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 395–​9, 430–​9. 24. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenments, 17; Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, 40.

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25. Neil Jameson, ‘Been There, Done That, Designed the T-​Shirt’, Newcastle Herald (14 November 2009), 8, available online: http://​newsstore.fairfax.com.au/​apps/​ viewDocument.ac;jsessionid=60FD31D5140BBDE8651F7E42CCC23AF8?sy= afr&pb=all_​ffx&dt=selectRange&dr=1month&so=relevance&sf=text&sf=head line&rc=10&rm=200&sp=brs&cls=678&clsPage=1&docID=NCH091114133Q Q4N6JCN. 26. Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 54–​73.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Edited by J. M. Bernstein. London: Routledge, 1991. Adorno, Theodor W. Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/​1966. Translated by R. Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008. First published 2003. Page numbers refer to the 2008 edition. Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. Reprinted New York: Seabury, 1973. First published 1966. Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialektik. Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003. First published 1966. Adorno, Theodor W. Vorlesung über Negative Dialektik: Fragmente zur Vorlesung 1965/​66. Nachgelassenen Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007. First published 2003. Page numbers refer to the 2007 edition. Berry, Jess. ‘A Uniform Approach? Designing Australian National Identity at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games’. Journal of Design History 26, no. 1 (2013): 86–​103. Boer, Roland. Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology. Historical Materialism Book Series. Leiden: Brill; Chicago: Haymarket, 2007. Boer, Roland. ‘Kapitalfetisch: “The Religion of Everyday Life”’. International Critical Thought 1, no. 4 (2011): 416–​26. Boni, Federico. ‘Mamboing Matilda: Surf Life-​Style T-​shirts and Representations of Australian Cultural Identity’. In Imagined Australia: Reflections around the Reciprocal Production of Identity between Australia and Europe, edited by Renata Summo-​O’Connell, 201–​14. Bern: Peter Lang, 2009. Buck-​Morss, Susan. The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute. New York: The Free Press, 1977. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Translated by E. Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. First published 1947.

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Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente. Gesammelte Schriften 3. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003. First published 1947. Jameson, Fredric. Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic. London: Verso, 1990. Jameson, Neil. ‘Been There, Done That, Designed the T-​Shirt’. Newcastle Herald (14 November 2009), 8. Available online: http://​newsstore.fairfax.com.au/​apps/​ viewDocument.ac;jsessionid=60FD31D5140BBDE8651F7E42CCC23AF8?sy=af r&pb=all_​ffx&dt=selectRange&dr=1month&so=relevance&sf=text&sf=headline &rc=10&rm=200&sp=brs&cls=678&clsPage=1&docID=NCH091114133QQ4N6 JCN. Johnson, Anna, and Reg Mombassa. Art Irritates Life. Sydney: Mambo Graphics, 1994. Jung, Carl. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Translated by Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Khamis, Susie. ‘Mambo Justice: An Unnnatural Alliance?’ Altitude 4 (2004). Available online: https://​thealtitudejournal.files.wordpress.com/​2011/​05/​khamis.pdf. Lukács, Georg. Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein. Georg Lukács Werke 2. Neuwied und Berlin: Hermann Luchterhand, 1968. Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Translated by R. Livingstone. Cambridge: MIT, 1988. First published 1968. Page numbers refer to the 1988 edition. Mambo World website. Available online: http://​www.mambo-​world.com/​. McKenzie, Janet. The Art of Ken Done. St. Leonards: Craftsman House, 2002. O’Doherty, Chris. ‘Self Portrait with Spots and Veins’. National Portrait Gallery website. Available online: http://​www.portrait.gov.au/​site/​Reg_​Mombassa.php. Parish, Steve. Photograph Australia with Steve Parish. Archerfield: Steve Parish Publishing, 2003. Reg Mombassa official website. Available online: http://​regmombassa.com/​. Waldron, Murray. The Mind and Times of Reg Mombassa. Sydney: HarperCollins, 2009. Witkin, Robert. Adorno on Music. London: Routledge, 1998.

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Architectural Expression of the Body of Christ Murray Rae

Seeing things differently Reflecting on his collaboration with musician James McMillan and poet Michael Symmons Roberts in the musical theatre piece Parthenogenesis, theologian Rowan Williams writes: Art, whether Christian or not, can’t properly begin with a message and then seek for a vehicle. Its roots lie, rather, in the single story or metaphor or configuration of sound or shape which requires attention and development from the artist. In the process of that development, we find meaning we had not suspected.1

‘We find meaning we had not suspected.’ That, surely, is one of the foremost contributions that art makes to our apprehension of the world. Artists help us to see differently, and to discern that which had gone unnoticed. Jeremy Begbie confirms the point:  ‘Realities hitherto unnoticed’, he says, ‘come to meet me through art, call forth my attention, shift my outlook’.2 That is true, I  shall contend, of those arts that contribute to the formation of our built environment. Buildings are not merely enclosures that offer privacy and shelter us from the elements. Beyond those and other functional purposes, they also speak of meanings and values, of what we hold dear, of where we have come from and of what we aspire to. A house that has been made a home, for instance, gives expression to a particular vision of human well-​being: through the arrangement of its spaces, through its orientation to its neighbours and

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to the environment, through its decoration and through the artefacts housed and arranged there. A house in its built form may speak of openness and of hospitality, or, when surrounded by high garden walls and closed off by security gates, it may gesture in more hostile terms to the surrounding world. Or again, the modernist vision of the house as ‘a machine for living in’ yielded as one of its most unfortunate products those housing estates that were sterile in character, subjected their occupants to the homogenizing forces of mass production and had little concern for beauty or for the expression of individuality. Such housing condemned their occupants to a life of bland drudgery, which resulted, almost inevitably, in the disintegration of community and the rise of antisocial behaviours. Our built environments are by no means the sole contributor to human well-​being, but they have a significant role to play in establishing a place for us in this world that contributes to our flourishing as human beings rather than to our enslavement. The same is true of architecture that is dedicated to some theological purpose, most obviously, of course, the architecture that is built for worship and as a gathering place for the people of God. Such buildings may be read as texts that speak of a particular people’s self-​understanding –​as the body of Christ, as the people of God, as a missional community, as those being made into a holy temple and so on. The places in which Christians gather for worship, whether they take the form of a Gothic cathedral or a converted warehouse, speak of meanings and values whether consciously chosen or not. I propose to investigate what might be learned about the nature of the church through consideration of two New Zealand buildings, both of which, while drawing upon sources elsewhere, are products nonetheless of a distinctively Māori architectural and theological imagination. The two buildings are Te Maungārongo, the wharenui (meeting house) at the national marae (communal space) of the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand, and Futuna Chapel at the Marist retreat centre in Wellington. Futuna Chapel has been described by architect Martin Purdy as an example of humane regionalism in architecture, which ‘seeks to mould the environment by developing the ethos of a particular culture; setting new building within a continuity which acknowledges the richness of local tradition, but welcomes the possibility of the new’.3 Humane regionalism, Purdy continues, ‘is particularly important to New Zealand, as the country develops its own identity from Polynesian and

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European antecedents’.4 Attention to regional concerns is noted as well by J. G. Davies who contends that what is required in New Zealand architecture is ‘a fusion of the past, which must include Polynesian [Māori] tradition, with a creative vision that gives expression to a newly emerging national identity’.5 The capacity of artists to draw our attention to realities ‘hitherto unnoticed’ is thus, in part, a function of their particular location. Postmodern sensibility has alerted us to the fact that things look different according to the place from which they are viewed. What, then, may be learned about the reality of the church when that reality is seen through South Pacific eyes, and is given form in an architecture that draws on Māori as well as European cultural traditions? It is necessary, however, in an article of this length to narrow the scope of that question a little. In the two buildings here considered, attention will therefore be given to the more specific question: what may be learned of the church as the ‘body of Christ’?6

The wharenui at Ōhope A wharenui is, literally, a large house, but the term designates more particularly the sacred meeting house of a particular iwi (tribe) or hapū (sub-​tribe) of the Māori people. The wharenui is the focal point of a marae, an area of land set aside for the gathering of the people, and regarded by that people as their tūrangawaewae, their place to stand tall. Through the generosity of Māori people within the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand, that church has a national marae presided over and cared for by the tangata whenua, the indigenous people of the particular land upon which the marae is located. In this case, the tangata whenua are Tūhoe, one of the main tribal groups who belong to the forested hills of Te Urewera and whose traditional lands reach down to the coast at Whakatāne and Ōhope. The national church marae is a place of meeting and of hospitality that symbolizes and embodies the covenant relationality between Māori and Pākehā (non-​Māori) established through Christ and reflected in the Treaty of Waitangi.7 The marae is located at Ōhope, just around the headland south of Whakatāne. It was established there in 1947 as the tūrangawaewae of Te Aka Puaho, the Presbyterian Māori Synod. The marae was established and a wharenui was built there in 1947. Initially an old

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Figure 4.1  The meeting house, Ōhope marae.

stable building was relocated from Whakatāne to serve as the wharenui. By the early 1970s, however, the original building had deteriorated through age and was no longer large enough to accommodate the needs of the church. The synod set about planning and building a new wharenui, which was completed in 1977. The Ōhope marae is barely visible from the main road. It is set back among native trees on a grassy slope rising towards the hills above Ōhope township. Access is by foot, and the wharenui becomes visible only as visitors make their way through the trees onto the marae ātea, the piece of open land in front of the wharenui upon which the formal protocols of welcome and reception are undertaken. Meeting houses built by Māori are often regarded as whare tipuna, houses embodying an ancestor (Figure 4.1). This is the norm among tribal groups in the Bay of Plenty. The koruru (carved head) at the apex of the barge-​boards

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is the ancestor’s head. The barge-​boards themselves, the maihi, are the arms of the ancestor; the tāhuhu or ridge beam is the backbone, and the heke or rafters are the ribs. Beneath the maihi, a sheltering porch, te poho, represents the breast of the ancestor: ‘To enter it is to be drawn into his bosom, enfolded in his embrace.’8 The matapihi or window is the all-​seeing eye of the ancestor, watching for the return of his children, while the door or tatau is the mouth kept open as a sign of welcome. Inside the wharenui, the poutokomanawa or central column supporting the ridge beam can be interpreted as the ancestor’s beating heart, while the poupou or columns supporting the rafters represent key figures in the story of the people. The wharenui at Ōhope marae takes up and continues this tradition, but it is quite explicitly a Christian marae, ‘founded in Christ and dedicated to Christ’.9 Accordingly, the ancestor represented in the wharenui is Jesus Christ. The name of the house, Te Maungārongo, means ‘the unifier  –​the creator of peace and harmony’.10 The people of the marae explain that Christ is ‘the Prince of Peace [who] provides shelter for the children of God’.11 They expound further that ‘[a]‌ll people, all races, and all creeds, should feel welcome at Te Maungārongo, under its outstretched maihi –​carved as the sheltering and welcoming arms of the wharenui and thus of Christ and his church’.12 The upright pillars, or amo, at either side of the porch are traditionally warriors who guard the wharenui, but here the ‘warriors’ are, to the right, ngā toa o te aroha, the guardians of love, and to the left, ngā toa kaitiaki, those who care for the house and who would lay down their lives in defence of the faith.13 At Te Maungārongo, the koruru at the apex of the maihi is referred to as the parata (Figure 4.2). While the koruru is often a threatening figure who wields a taiaha, a weapon of war, the parata at Te Maungārongo challenges with a cross. The tangata whenua explain that it is ‘a welcoming challenge to turn swords into ploughshares, to take up the cross and follow Christ’s example in life’.14 To enter this building, to enter this body of Christ, is to set aside enmity and to follow the way of peace. Traditional Māori protocols provide, of course, for the setting aside of differences on the marae ātea before entering the wharenui: ‘It is unthinkable to Māori tradition that any conflict in word or deed should ever take place within the privacy and protection of the wharenui.’15 Paul adopts the same stance in respect of the body of Christ when he speaks at length in Eph. 2.11–​22 of the walls of hostility between people having been

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Figure 4.2  The parata, Ōhope marae.

broken down on account of their having been united in one body in Christ. Paul is referring specifically here to the reconciliation of two distinct ethnic groups, Jews and Gentiles, or Jews and non-​Jews, two groups between whom there had been enmity and tension. Given that the audience Paul is addressing includes both Jews and non-​Jews who confess allegiance to Christ, he insists that this shared allegiance, and more particularly Christ’s claim upon them as his own people, should override any former differences they may have had. There is a close parallel here with the distinction between Māori and Pākehā, Māori and non-​Māori; in Christ, the two groups become one. The architecture of Te Maungārongo establishes quite literally the space in which that reality is enacted. In the same passage in Ephesians, Paul refers to the church’s unity in the Spirit. Through Christ, we have access in one Spirit to the Father (Eph. 2.18). This unity in the Spirit and the Spirit’s enlivening of the church to be a witness

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in the world is also represented in Te Maungārongo. The third pair of poupou (upright posts) flanking the porch of Te Maungārongo represent the tribal orators. Their divided tongues recall the coming of the Spirit at the first Pentecost (Acts 2.1–​4) and the power to speak in many languages in order to spread the Word of Christ throughout the world.16 Above the porch window, the swirling patterns of the carved lintel represent the wind, another reference to the Spirit. In both Hebrew (rūaḥ) and Greek (pneuma), the word translated into English as ‘spirit’ (via the Latin spiritus) can also be translated as ‘wind’ or ‘breath’ (e.g. Gen. 1.2 and Acts 2.2). In yet another expression of the Spirit’s presence, the builders of Te Maungārongo followed ancient tradition in placing a taonga, a treasured object, in a secret location during the construction of the building. The taonga symbolizes the mauri or sacred principle of life and is a reminder that the building and its people are sustained by a spiritual power. According to those who built Te Maungārongo, ‘The mauri . . . is equivalent to the Holy Spirit of the Christian faith. Consecrated and dedicated, this wharenui is blessed with the eternal presence of the Holy Spirit over it as protector and guardian against any form of evil and invasion.’17 Complementing the external form of the wharenui, three art forms contribute to the building’s interior decoration and continue the representation of the body of Christ (Figure 4.3). First is the carving, the whakairo, executed by carvers Te Ahinamu Te Hira, Karaka Takao and John Rua. Most prominent here are the poupou  –​the internal posts that extend, as mentioned, down either side of the building. Each one represents, simultaneously, figures in Māori and biblical traditions. Arranged in pairs on opposite sides of the whare, the fourth pair, for instance, are Whiro and Tāne, ‘two ancestral brothers who fought between themselves for recognition and supremacy’.18 They also represent Cain and Abel, the first brothers of the Bible’s primeval history whose relationship was destroyed by enmity (Genesis 4). The brothers are not historical figures, but they tell a story of human rivalry that has been replayed time and again through the course of human history. The fifth pair of poupou depicts another set of brothers, Tānenuiarangi and Rongomaraeroa, acknowledged ‘for their part in bringing peace between the children of Ranginui (sky father) and Papatūānuku (mother earth). Like Seth and Enoch (Gen. 5.1–​24), they found favour with God and in these poupou, they symbolise contentment and peace in the gentle lines of the carvings and the attitude of prayer’.19 Twelve

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Figure 4.3  Meeting house interior, Ōhope marae.

such pairs of poupou flank the interior. On the end wall, further poupou depict the disciples of Christ and the apostle Paul. The carvings, as all the decorative elements in the wharenui, serve a catechetical purpose. They tell the stories of the people who are gathered in this place as the body of Christ, and they signal the presence still of the communion of saints, a people extended through time and space who are made one in Christ. We cannot properly speak of the building and the people as distinct from one another here; rather, together, they are the body of Christ. Nor is it adequate to regard these elements of the building as merely symbolic. As with the mystery of the sacramental body and blood of Christ, one feels at Te Maungārongo that, while not requiring any definitive account of how it should be so, Christ has nevertheless honoured his promise to be present in the midst of his people. The second form of traditional Māori art used in the building of Te Maungārongo appears on the tāhū, the ridge beam and backbone of Christ,

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and on the heke, the rafters that represent his ribs. These are decorated with kōwhaiwhai, scroll painting traditionally used to record tribal genealogies. The kōwhaiwhai panels employ three colours: black, representing the earth; red, representing blood and life; and white, representing purity. They employ stylized patterns variously named after natural phenomena, especially the shark (mako) and flounder (pātiki), fern fronds (kaponga) and waves of the sea (ngaru). These patterns do not bear a straightforward resemblance to the natural entity from which they take their names. Following the semiological distinction between denotational and conotational meaning proposed by Roland Barthes, Roger Neich advises that ‘Māori art has limited denotative meaning but a wide, rich field of connotative meaning’.20 Accordingly, the flowing patterns are commonly taken to indicate the growth and dynamic movement of all life. In this particular building, representing the body of Christ, they indicate the vitality and growth of the created order that has come to be in and for Christ: ‘For in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers –​all things have been created through him and for him’ (Col. 1.16). This passage in Colossians (1.20) goes on to speak of all things being reconciled through Christ, a theme consonant with the characterization of Te Maungārongo as the body of Christ in whom all are reconciled. The third art form used extensively at Te Maungārongo is the tukutuku weaving that covers the walls above the carved dados. Like the carvings, the tukutuku panels tell the story of the people who belong to this place (Figure 4.4). It is a story woven from both biblical and Māori traditions, and daily establishes, renews and sustains the life of the people. The poutama (stepped pattern) found in some of these tukutuku panels signifies the lifting and leading of the people to Christ. The purapura whetū design, meanwhile, denotes a myriad of stars, representing the immense variety and number of peoples in the world. The fish pattern (te ika) recalls the traditional Christian symbol that refers to Christ and to the Christian identity of those who display the symbol. The roimata toroa –​tears of an albatross –​is another symbol used frequently throughout the panels.21 These tears recall the tears of Christ. The tukutuku panels at Te Maungārongo were designed by Horiana Laughton and Rerekau Foster, both of whom also supervised the weaving. Every parish throughout the Presbyterian Māori Synod took responsibility for

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Figure 4.4  Tukutuku panels, Ōhope marae.

crafting a set of panels and then brought them to Ōhope to be placed in the wharenui. In this way, the Synod ensured that a further feature of the body of Christ would be confirmed, namely, that every member of the community has a part to play. Recall Paul’s contention in 1 Cor. 12.14–​21: ‘Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many . . . As it is, there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you” ’. And in v.26: ‘If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it.’ The tukutuku panels at Te Maungārongo, the combined work of parishes throughout the Synod, stand as a permanent reminder that this is the way things are in the body of Christ. I have offered just a brief sketch of the artistic riches of Te Maungārongo and of its expression of Christian faith woven together with the whakapapa (genealogy) of a particular people descended from those who arrived in Aotearoa

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on the Mātaatua waka (Mātaatua canoe).22 As stated earlier, Te Maungārongo means ‘the bringer of peace’. Christ is the one who brings peace and his body is represented in the whare at Ōhope marae. In the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, the journey towards peace and reconciliation between Māori and Pākehā comes readily to mind. The peace and reconciliation between Jew and Gentile spoken of by Paul in Eph. 2.11–​22 can speak also of the peace and unity among tangata whenua (indigenous peoples) and tauiwi (people from afar) who come together at Te Maungārongo: [Christ] reconcile[s]‌both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God. (Eph. 2.16–​22)

The metaphor of a building used here by Paul captures in part what is expressed through the architecture of Te Maungārongo, but a further important element is expressed in the image found in John’s gospel of Jesus’ disciples dwelling in him: ‘Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me’ (Jn 15.4). One of the key figures who oversaw the design and construction of Te Maungārongo, the Reverend Warren Foster, once said of it:  ‘You see Te Maungārongo with all his art, as a story that lives . . . in all concepts a place where you can behold, meditate, and feel, the story of Christ; a story that never grows old, a story that is completely woven around you, a story that is completely dedicated to the glory of God.’23 Te Maungārongo speaks of meanings and values; it speaks of the love and the hospitality of Christ, and it draws together in reconciled relationship all who gather within its sheltering embrace. I have suggested earlier that through the experience of art, we are helped to see differently and to discern that which might otherwise go unnoticed. What is it, then, that we may see differently through experiencing Te Maungārongo?

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Unsurprisingly, the fullness of new insight and the richness of new experience cannot be given in words. Words cannot stand in for the experience of architecture itself, or indeed for other forms of art. But some indication can be given as to how our theology may be enriched through this piece of architecture. In the first place, Te Maungārongo reveals the inadequacy of the Western tendency to regard biblical reference to the church as the body of Christ as a ‘mere’ metaphor gesturing towards some spiritual reality. To speak of the body of Christ among Māori in the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand is to speak quite concretely of Te Maungārongo, the whare tipuna in whose embrace we are gathered, by whom we are being formed as a people and under whose sheltering arms we must set aside all enmity and be a people at peace. This all happens in the body of Christ, which is to say it happens in this particular location. Second, the Reformed heritage of the Presbyterian Church has long been suspicious of the claim that material realities may be the means of God’s self-​ presentation. Legitimate concerns about idolatry and safeguarding the transcendence of God notwithstanding, the Reformed tradition is only in recent years beginning to recover a theologically responsible account of God’s self-​ disclosure through material realities. God’s presence in bread and wine, as in the flesh and blood of Christ himself, renders it theologically plausible that carved wood and woven reeds might also be pressed into service as instruments of God’s communicative presence. Third, Jewish and Christian tradition affirms that God is present in all places. God is omnipresent. Yet biblical tradition and subsequent theological witness also allow for the intensification of God’s presence in particular places and at particular times. Abraham at Bethel (Gen. 12.8) or Moses before the burning bush (Exod. 3.1–​6) or Samuel in the temple (1 Sam. 3.1–​18) provide testimony to the particular presence of God. Te Maungārongo is a place that, through the artistry of its builders, calls our attention to the particular presence of God. The architecture does not itself compel God to be present. Rather, we might say, God consistently honours with his presence the faithfulness of those who devoted their art and their craft to the glory of God. And finally, Te Maungārongo reminds us unequivocally that dwelling within the body of Christ is constitutive of Christian identity. For the people of the Presbyterian Māori Synod, and indeed for many Pākehā who have been

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welcomed into Te Maungārongo’s embrace, their identity as people of Christ and members of Christ’s body is confirmed, preserved and nourished in and through this building. The architecture commands attention, not simply to itself, but to the truth it tells of the one who brings peace, who makes us members of his body, and who invites us to dwell in him.

Futuna Chapel In 1958, architect John Scott was commissioned by members of the Society of Mary to design a chapel to be set in the grounds of the Society’s retreat centre in the Wellington suburb of Karori. Scott was a child of mixed heritage. Through his mother, he inherited English, Irish and Māori blood, while his father was from Scottish and Māori stock. The dual British and Māori heritage is evident in much of Scott’s work, especially at Futuna. Scott’s particular aesthetic and spiritual sensibilities were profoundly influenced as well by his Catholic faith. On leaving school, he had contemplated becoming a priest, but, following a brief career in the air force, he turned to architecture.24 The progress of Scott’s career has been documented elsewhere.25 Suffice to say that his development as an architect involved a deeply personal quest to create an architecture that was attentive to European tradition and drew fruitfully upon it, but that was also rooted in New Zealand soil. Attracted by Scott’s sympathy for the needs of a Catholic retreat centre, the brothers of the Society of Mary invited him to design a chapel for their centre (Figure 4.5). At the beginning of the project, Scott spent a full day at the retreat centre engaged in conversation with the brothers and learning about the rhythms of the spiritual retreats. ‘Almost automatically’, according to Russell Walden, ‘Scott identified this place of retreat with the Māori marae, and the chapel with the meeting house.’26 Just as the wharenui is the focal point and heart of the marae, so too, the chapel would lie at the heart of the retreat centre, both physically and spiritually. While Russell Walden suggests that a bone fragment of St Peter Chanel, located in the altar of Futuna Chapel, accords with the Māori tradition of identifying the wharenui with the body of an ancestor,27 the architecture itself provides strong support for the notion that visitors to this chapel are welcomed, above all, into the body of Christ.

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Figure 4.5  Futuna Chapel exterior.

The influence of the Māori wharenui is made explicit in one of Scott’s early sketches for the chapel (Figure 4.6). The ancestor’s arms of embrace and the gestures of welcome and protection found in the wharenui provide direct inspiration for the porch of the chapel, while the cruciform arrangement of the ridge beams, described by Scott as a ‘European’ convention, provides further support for the idea that Christ’s body is represented here. Exploring further the influence of the wharenui upon Scott’s conception of the chapel, Walden explains that Scott could use dipping eaves like the meeting house barge boards (maihi). He could make them swoop to the ground and symbolise notions of warmth and acceptance . . . From the land, through the concrete walls, to the soaring hips and gables of the roof, in a subtle interplay of cruciform and tent forms, this chapel had a great opportunity to creatively symbolise an integration of European and Polynesian culture.28

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Figure 4.6  Preliminary design ideas for Futuna Chapel.

While the sheltering porch and the arms of embrace are generous in proportion, being thus commensurate with the hospitality of Christ, the actual doors by which one enters the chapel are narrow. They recall the ‘narrow door’ (Lk. 13.24) that leads to salvation, and encourage a careful and contemplative passage into the heart of the chapel itself. Just as participation in the life of Christ is not to be undertaken thoughtlessly or presumptuously, this is not a space to be entered without reverence and careful deliberation. Inside the chapel, there are further motifs borrowed from the meetinghouse. A central post supporting the ridge beams recalls the poutokomanawa of the wharenui and its representation of the ancestor’s beating heart. From part way up the central post, a series of eight braces radiate outwards to support the roof structure. Their resemblance of a tree with its radiating branches evokes Jesus’ words ‘I am the vine and you are the branches’ (Jn 15.5) and offers a further reminder of the relationship between Christ and his church. On entering the interior, one’s attention is directed to the altar and the carved wooden crucifix immediately behind and above it (Figure 4.7). The rough-​hewn granite slab that forms the altar and the eight-​feet-​high representation of the crucified Christ are striking enough, but are made all the more so by the patterns of coloured light that strike these symbols of Christ’s self-​offering from the coloured windows above. The intensity, the colours and the patterns of light change dramatically according to the brightness and position of the sun throughout the day. Splashes of red light fall from time to time upon the pierced hands and feet of Christ and across the altar

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Figure 4.7  Crucifix, Futuna Chapel.

where Christ’s body and blood are offered in sacramental confirmation that Christ is present in the midst of his people. The body of Christ represented here is the crucified body. Altar and crucifix together constitute the central focus of the chapel. Those who come to worship are drawn into contemplation of Christ’s suffering and are invited to participate in the divine drama of death and resurrection. The story of Christ’s suffering and death is told also in the fourteen Stations of the Cross that surround the chapel. Although the Stations are a tradition that developed independently, they serve a function similar to the poupou in Te Maungārongo. Just as the poupou tell the story of a people’s historical formation and the establishment of their distinct identity as a people, so the Stations tell the story of a people given their identity by and called to share in the way of Christ. ‘Take up your cross and follow me’ is the instruction given to those who would be disciples of Christ (Mt. 16.24).

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Figure  4.8  Futuna Chapel interior. Image used with permission of Victoria University Press.

The chapel floor is formed with flagstones of pounamu, greenstone taken from the rivers of New Zealand’s South Island. Pounamu is regarded by Māori as a taonga, or treasure, which has its own mana (sacred status, power, honour).29 The flagstones reinforce the notion that we are on sacred ground, while the soaring roof gestures toward the heavens. Through the glazed vertical planes of the folded roof structure, the chapel receives heaven’s light (Figure  4.8). Humanity exists, according to Māori sensibility, within the embrace of earth and sky, between mother earth, Papatūānuku, beneath, and Ranginui, the sky father, above. Though not personified in the same way, Christian theology too presents the arrangement of earth and sky in terms of the divine provision of a dwelling place, not only for humans but for all God’s creatures (Genesis 1). These commonalities in Māori and Christian culture clearly inspired the architect’s imagination.30 The ‘earthiness’ of the chapel’s interior is reinforced by the predominance of natural materials, greenstone, concrete and timber

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especially. Yet all are enlivened by the ever-​changing patterns of coloured light that fall upon the chapel’s interior surfaces and which have their source outside of ourselves, and outside of the chapel itself. Artificial light creates its own mood of contemplation and intimacy when the chapel is lit at night, but it is during the day, when the chapel continually responds to the changing direction and intensity of light from the sun, that the dynamism of Christ’s life-​ giving presence is most powerfully portrayed. The various elements that make Futuna Chapel such a theologically rich and profoundly moving space are the product of the combined creative genius of the architect John Scott and the artist Jim Allen who began working with Scott at an early stage of the building project. Allen designed the coloured windows, the crucifix and the Stations of the Cross. Before accepting the commission, however, Allen sought assurance that he would have the appropriate degree of artistic freedom. It is a testament to Scott’s respect for the particular gifts of his artistic collaborator, replicated in the trust placed in both Scott and Allen by the Marist brothers themselves, that Allen was granted the freedom he needed to contribute to the realization of Scott’s vision in ways that exceeded the architect’s own expectations. By allowing this creative freedom to architect and artist alike, and by building the chapel themselves, the Marist brothers likewise made their own contribution to the singular purpose of creating a building that would show forth the glory of God and draw people into the mystery of God’s presence among us. That the body of Christ is comprised of many parts, each having its own contribution to make, is again represented in the story of this chapel’s construction. To speak of the body of Christ is to speak, as Robert Jenson contends, of Christ’s availability.31 Through his incarnate presence, and sacramentally in the Eucharist, Christ makes himself available to us. The term ‘sacrament’ refers to God’s self-​presentation through created realities, primarily and above all in the earthly body of Jesus Christ, and then, derivatively, in water, wine and bread. The notion of sacramentality presumes the goodness of creation; it presumes that what is created by God is suitable for the working out of God’s purposes and can be an instrument of divine self-​communication. Through bread and wine, the fruits of God’s creation, God is present for us. God’s ways with humanity are such, however, that human creativity too can serve as witness to and instrument of God’s self-​communicative presence. The words of

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the Eucharistic liturgy thus confess, ‘Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation. Through your goodness we have this bread to offer, which earth has given and human hands have made. It will become for us the bread of life’.32 The work of human hands is pressed into the service of God’s purposes, into the establishment of that communion of love between God and God’s creatures that is the goal of creation itself. As with bread and wine, so too with concrete, wood and stone; these elements taken from the earth are fashioned by human hands and, by God’s grace, they become instruments of divine presence. The divine agency here, the divine grace, is represented at Futuna through the Eucharistic liturgy itself, but also through the changing patterns of light. Scott and Allen planned for this, but what emerged exceeded their expectations. Jim Allen describes the first time that the enriching potential of the light became apparent: You can imagine the very first time we saw it –​I think it was John that saw it first. He came running in –​as we were in another building –​‘come on, come on, come and have a look at this’. We all ran across to the chapel –​ the yellow and blood-​red light was on the wall –​the most amazing thing, because within the next hour there were people standing there in silence –​ just watching the light, the way it moved across and up the wall. And it was the first time it had been seen. I had never imagined it occurring in that kind of way at all. I knew the light would go across the wall, but I never imagined it would come in this kind of way. It was quite shattering.33

Here we see something of the potential of art to reveal more than may be imagined by its creators. We may recognize as well in this experience the availability of art for divine use. The works of human hands may become, by divine grace, instruments through which the glory of God is revealed in ways exceeding human capacity and imagination. Here we come upon an important theological principle. God is not known to us on account of some capacity of our own, be it cognitive or creative. God is known by us just insofar as God grants to us that which we can never attain by ourselves, namely his own presence. Futuna Chapel then, is a place in which we are encouraged to wait upon the Lord. We are encouraged to wait upon the gift of divine presence, made manifest here especially through light. In the completed chapel, the blood-​red light falls, unexpectedly again, upon the wounded hands and feet of Christ and upon the altar at which the body and blood of Christ are offered to and for those who are gathered in the

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fellowship of Christ’s body; when this happens, these works of human hands may become the means by which the presence of Christ among us is recognized and received. As Russell Walden writes: Futuna’s Voices of Silence can transform passive onlookers into active participants, and the full experience of Futuna celebrates the idea of a developing community gathered around the altar. It provides a human and an inspirational environment, in which people can participate in the spiritual dimension. ‘This is my body which will be given for you’ (Lk. 22.19). When the full implications of this Eucharistic prayer are understood, the long journey is over. We arrive with a deep feeling of conviction and peace.34

Conclusion In Western imagination, the metaphor of the body of Christ has been taken to refer, in the main, to that gathering of people who confess Christ as Lord. The metaphor of the body signifies the unity of that people under the headship of Christ. Additionally, thanks to Paul’s extension of the metaphor in 1 Corinthians 12, the ‘body of Christ’ is understood to be comprised of various members, each having an important part to play in the life of the community. All of this is fine, so far as it goes, but as is evident in Te Maungārongo and in Futuna Chapel, Māori tradition and imagination contributes something more to our understanding of the church as the body of Christ. Drawing upon a tradition in which buildings are conceived as the body of an ancestor, Te Maungārongo and Futuna guide us to recognize the body of Christ as a particular locus. It is a place to which we may go when we seek Christ’s presence, a place where we may dwell within the embrace of Christ and a place in which we are formed as a people through encounter with the living God. The word ‘place’ here is not used metaphorically. Although we are often reminded that the church is not the building but the people gathered by Christ, Te Maungārongo and Futuna Chapel challenge that simple distinction and call attention to the ways in which material culture serves not merely as a backdrop to some spiritual realm, but has its own part to play in the formation of the people as the body of Christ. Divine omnipresence notwithstanding, these architectural works also remind us that God encounters us in particular places

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and at particular times. To speak of the church as the body of Christ is to speak of a people gathered under the headship of Christ, but it is to speak as well, in terms appropriate to our embodied material existence, of Christ’s locatability. Honouring the faith of architects and artisans who have endeavoured to build places that speak of him, Christ in love and freedom makes himself available to those who seek him there.

Notes 1. Rowan Williams, ‘Making It Strange: Theology in Other(s’) Words’, in Sounding the Depths: Theology through the Arts, ed. Jeremy Begbie (London: SCM Press, 2002), 28; emphasis in the original. 2. Jeremy Begbie, ‘Introduction’, in Jeremy Begbie (ed.) Sounding the Depths, 2. 3. Martin Purdy, ‘Foreword’, in Voices of Silence: New Zealand’s Chapel of Futuna, Russell Walden (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1987), 13. 4. Ibid. 5. J. G. Davies ‘Foreword’, in Walden, Voices of Silence, 9. 6. A more extensive study of Futuna Chapel, focused especially on the chapel as a locus of contemplative silence, is provided by Walden in Voices of Silence. 7. The Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840, established a convenantal partnership between Māori and the British Crown, and also the terms under which British settlement of New Zealand was to take place. 8. Diane Gilliam-​Knight and Loren Robb (eds.), Te Maungarongo: The Ancestral House of the Maori Synod (Wellington: Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand, 1992), 23. The consultants for this volume were Warren Foster, Millie Te Kaawa, Sonny and Mona Riini and Te Aouru Biddle. 9. Ibid., 21. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 9. 13. Ibid., 22. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 10. 16. Ibid., 23. 17. Ibid., 21. 18. Ibid., 25. 19. Ibid., 26. 20. Roger Neich, Painted Histories (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1993), 36.

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21. The Ngāti Porou tribe tell the story of their ancestor Pourangahua bringing kūmara (sweet potato) to New Zealand. So enamoured was he by his beautiful wife waiting to greet him, he forgot to offer the prayers of thanksgiving to the two sacred albatrosses that had accompanied him on the journey. Having made love with his wife, Pourangahua looked back and saw the tears of the albatrosses. This story, according to Ngāti Porou, is the source of the roimata toroa design. The story is recalled in Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal, ‘Papatūanuku –​the land –​Whakapapa and kaupapa’, in Te Ara –​the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, available online: http://​www,TeAra.govt.nz/​en/​ speech/​11470/​roimata-​toroa-​pattern. 22. Māori tribes trace their genealogy back to a particular waka or canoe in which their people are said to have journeyed from Hawaiki to New Zealand. The stories of journey and arrival contain both historical and symbolic elements and are important markers of identity for Māori tribal groups. 23. Gilliam-​Knight and Robb, Te Maungarongo, 38. 24. The biographical details are taken from Walden, Voices of Silence, 49–​50. 25. Ibid., 51–​9. 26. Ibid., 60. 27. St Peter Chanel, in whose memory the chapel was named, was a French Catholic priest and missionary, martyred on the Pacific island of Futuna in 1841. 28. Walden, Voices of Silence, 66–​7. 29. Mana is a word used by Māori to indicate sacred status, power and honour. It can be used of individuals who have earned respect, and of a people. Mana can also be attributed to inanimate objects because of their symbolic power and because of their use in significant events. 30. Russell Walden (Voices of Silence, 67) suggests, in this regard, that it was a combination of Polynesian (Māori) and European culture that inspired the architect; but given the Middle Eastern roots of the Christian doctrine of creation, it seems better to speak of the coincidence of Māori and Christan insight, rather than of Māori and European, while acknowledging, of course, that the Christian doctrine of creation is itself deeply indebted to Hebrew thought. 31. Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology. Volume 2: The Works of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 214–​15. 32. This Eucahristic formula originated in the Catholic church but is commonly used in other branches of the Christian church. 33. From an interview with John Allen. Cited in Walden, Voices of Silence, 122; italics original. 34. Walden, Voices of Silence, 134.

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Bibliography Begbie, Jeremy. ‘Introduction’. In Begbie (ed.), Sounding the Depths, 1–​13. Begbie, Jeremy (ed.). Sounding the Depths: Theology through the Arts. London: SCM Press, 2002. Davies, J. G. ‘Foreword’. In Walden, Voices of Silence, 9–​10. Gilliam-​Knight, Diane, and Loren Robb (eds.). Te Maungarongo: The Ancestral House of the Maori Synod. Wellington: Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand, 1992. Jenson, Robert. Systematic Theology. Volume 2: The Works of God. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Neich, Roger. Painted Histories. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1993. Purdy, Martin. ‘Foreword’. In Walden, Voices of Silence, 11–​14. Royal, Te Ahukaramū Charles. ‘Papatūanuku –​the land –​Whakapapa and kaupapa’. Te Ara –​the Encyclopedia of New Zealand. Available online: http://​www,TeAra. govt.nz/​en/​speech/​11470/​roimata-​toroa-​pattern. Walden, Russell. Voices of Silence: New Zealand’s Chapel of Futuna. Wellington:  Victoria University Press, 1987. Williams, Rowan. ‘Making It Strange: Theology in Other(s’) Words’. In Begbie (ed.), Sounding the Depths, 19–​38.

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5

Art as Method Visualizing Interpretation through Tongan Ngatu Nāsili Vaka’uta

This work1 seeks to bring into the conversations on ‘the bible2 and art’ something different, that is, looking at art as method. Rather than following the norm of analysing biblical arts to discern an artist’s depiction of a biblical text, i3 will attempt (and it is indeed ‘an attempt’) to visualize biblical interpretation through Tongan arts.4 My goal is to establish a ngatu-​inspired5 framework for interpretation.

Why Tongan ngatu? Ngatu is Tongan for what is commonly known as tapa or barkcloth. It is a unique form of Oceanic art. What aspects of Tongan ngatu could be utilized as categories for analysing biblical texts? What sort of questions could be asked at texts based on those categories? Whose questions am i attempting to answer? Whose interests am i serving? What exactly am i looking for, and to what end? These and many other questions set the platform and direction for this work. The visualizing task is motivated, first of all, by a desire to explore non-​ European/​non-​continental visual arts and designs that reflect the lifeworld of, and connect with, indigenous readers of the bible. In Oceania, it is hard to find indigenous visual depictions of biblical figures or stories, but we do have arts with unique features, purposes and symbolisms. They reflect the social, spiritual and political ideals and aspirations of those who produced and shared

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them. Second, i need to add Oceanic voices to scholarship on the bible and visual art. Though there is lack of works on arts in relation to the bible, Oceania has numerous arts, both traditional and contemporary. Third, i think it is time to alter the direction of conversations on the subject. The majority of discussions about the bible and art look at classical and modern European arts, and those from other continental contexts (such as Asia, Africa and Latin America). I am seeking here to promote artworks from Oceania and to juxtapose them with biblical texts, which thus allow one ‘text’ to shed light on the other. Tongan artworks are not just parts of an Oceanic material culture. They are also integral elements of a sacred culture. Our arts –​ visual or otherwise –​have scriptural significance to our people, because they are imbued with mana (life energy). To talk about the bible and Tongan arts is in this sense an inter-​scriptural engagement. This accounts for the lack of biblical motifs in traditional Tongan arts. Before the arrival of missionaries and the bible on our shores, our native arts (visual and otherwise) were (and still are) our sacred scriptures. They communicate our beliefs and values from generation to generation. Finally, this work is about taking a small step forward in promoting Oceanic biblical interpretation; a step towards constructing other ways of reading that are informed by, reflective of and situated in Oceanic epistemologies, contexts and cultures.6 I will focus specifically in this work on the Tongan art form known as ngatu. Attention will be given to the process of its production, its cultural significance and uses and some key features from its patterns and designs. Ideas from these will serve as key hermeneutical markers for the framework i sketch herein. For that purpose, i divide the chapter into three parts. The first discusses the art of ngatu-​making, ngatu design and the functions and key features of the ngatu. The second seeks to construct a ngatu-​inspired framework based on the key elements discussed in the first part. The third, and final, part engages Gen. 1.1–​2.4a using the hermeneutical markers of the ngatu-​inspired framework.

Ngatu as art The word ‘ngatu’ is Tongan for an ancient indigenous art in Oceania that is as old as Oceanic societies themselves.7 Ngatu is known by different names

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Figure 5.1  Tongan ngatu.

in other Oceanic islands, for example, kapa in Hawaii, masi in Fiji, siapo in Samoa, hiapo in Niue and the generic name that non-​natives use for this art form is tapa. Ngatu is one among many artworks in the region, and its designs vary from one island to the next. Oceanic natives can identify the origin of a ngatu (i.e. to which island a ngatu links) just by observing its patterns and motifs (Figure 5.1).8 Ngatu is essentially a product of nature. It is made from the inner bark of hiapo (paper mulberry tree). The pieces of bark are beaten with a wooden mallet (called ike) on a tutua (wooden platform) in order to widen and then join them together to make larger pieces of barkcloth. The size of a ngatu is determined by various factors, but in most cases, by the occasion for which it is made and designed. There are several stages in the making of ngatu.9 After harvesting the hiapo, the outer bark is peeled off and the inner bark dried. When this has been done, several strands of the inner bark are rolled and then go through a fakavai (soaking) process, so that the bark can be easily fakapā (beaten) to soften, widen and straighten the various strands.

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As the thin bark pieces expand (from being beaten on the tutua), the next step is to match them, stick (‘opo’opo) them together and then leave to dry off any water (tauaki). At this stage, the matched pieces are called feta’aki. When dried, ngatu-​makers move on to cutting off (mutumutu) the rough edges, and again sticking them together (hokohoko) to form a longer and wider piece. At this stage, the barkcloth remains blank. The next phase involves spreading or unfolding the blank barkcloth on top of a long drawing board (papa koka’anga). Placed between the board and blank barkcloth are pre-​made patterns (kupesi) in equal symmetrical distance from each other. These pre-​made patterns determine the key features that appear on the face of the ngatu. To bring the pre-​made patterns from the underside of a ngatu, ngatu-​makers will hover over the blank ngatu and slowly paint its surface with reddish liquid made from the koka tree. In the end, the patterns emerge onto the surface. The final design of the ngatu is done at a time that is suitable for everyone involved. This designing process is called tohi ngatu (literally, ‘writing the ngatu’). Here ngatu-​makers use dark liquid from the bark of tongo plants (mangroves) to highlight the patterns that are already in place. They also have the liberty to draw onto the existing designs some additional motifs not only for decoration, but to tell stories, evoke memories and link the ngatu to a particular community, person or an event. Ngatu art is significant for many reasons. First, it is collectively made for collective purposes/​occasions (in contrast to individualistic arts of Europeans). As such, no individual can claim ownership only for themselves. That is why one cannot find an autograph on any ngatu. To successfully complete a ngatu, maintaining good relationship among the ngatu-​makers/​artists is crucial. They have to relate to each other with respect (faka’apa’apa), reciprocity (tauhi vā), devotion (mateaki) and humility (lototō) –​the four key values of Tongan society. In so doing, the completed piece will reflect what is important to, and valued by, a community. It also serves as a symbol of family or communal identity and status. Second, ngatu art is gender inclusive; it involves both men and women. The design however is done mostly by women, probably because of their patience and attention to detail. However, a ngatu not only features female imagination and their sense of beauty, but also epitomizes hard work and determination.

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Figure 5.2  The manulua pattern painted on a ngatu.

Third, ngatu is an indigenous cultural text and is inscribed with features of Tongan cultural traditions, memories and aspirations. It is a documentation or expression of culture.10 In one way or another it depicts genealogies, ranking, allegiance, legends and history.11 In many ways it symbolizes status. A  case in point is the popular ngatu pattern called manulua (Figure  5.2). Manulua appears to be a symmetrical juxtaposition of triangular shapes of two colours, but its meaning points to something else. This is what Tongan artists called heliaki; it is a key feature of Tongan arts where the meaning of a pattern or motif always points otherwise. The word ‘manulua’ means ‘two birds’ (see also Havea’s chapter), but its significance lies not in that literal meaning. It is used with reference to a person whose parents are from chiefly families, with equal status.12 Such a person is considered to be of a higher rank than a person with one or no chiefly parent. It also symbolizes the joining together of two families, such as in matrimony. Fourth, ngatu is associated with crucial moments in one’s life journey from birth to death.13 Traditionally, it is the first thing upon which a newborn baby is placed; it provides warmth and welcomes a newborn to life. At weddings, ngatu is what a bride would bring to her groom’s home; it is then folded and placed under the bed on the wedding night and is kept there as her koloa (treasured possession). Ngatu is highly valued even at funerals. It can be used to wrap around the body of the deceased for burial, or presented and shared among families and friends as a token of gratitude. For these reasons, the value of a Tongan woman’s wealth is traditionally determined by how much ngatu she has in her possession.

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Fifth, ngatu functions as a valuable gift in special occasions to special people.14 The higher the rank of a person, the bigger the size of the ngatu gifted to him or her. Gifting however is not something secondary to why a ngatu is made. Ngatu is made to be gifted. It is never made to be kept as decoration or to be stored in museums. Through gifting, a ngatu breathes new life. Sixth, ngatu is an identity marker for Tongans at home and in diaspora. To maintain ties with home, Tongans overseas ensure that they have ngatu in their possession, wear the ngatu proudly as clothing, carve the ngatu design onto their bodies as tatau, mark the interior of their fale (house) with it or lash the ngatu patterns into the main beams of their fale. In doing so, they are able to establish a renewed sense of belonging and strengthen connections with families in Tonga.15 Seventh, and finally, patterns and motifs on ngatu may differ, but there are key features that they all share. Each reflects, and symbolizes, some important aspects of Tongan culture and society. The following are illustrations: a. Lines. An important element in any ngatu design is the use of lines.16 Lines are used to mark boundaries on the face of the ngatu. These lines are drawn to intersect each other. In that way, the individual pieces of barkcloth (feta’aki) that made up the ngatu become one, and the face of the ngatu is redefined. This symbolizes how Tongan society is structured. There are ‘cultural lines’ that serve as social boundaries, but they also function to bring members of society together as one. They are not there to restrict and divide, but rather to define duties and to unite. A violation of those lines threatens social harmony. b. Spaces. Spaces defined by the intersecting lines occupy the face of the ngatu, and they reflect what Tongans call vā or vaha. Vā is about spaces and relations, and both are considered tapu, sacred and prohibited at once. What is drawn or written onto those spaces is determined by the pre-​made patterns that emerge from below the ngatu, rather than imposed upon (from above) the canvas, as in Western paintings. c. Symmetry. Another feature on the ngatu design is symmetry. The Tongan word is potupotutatau (in abbreviated form, ‘tatau’; cf. Havea’s chapter). Both the lines and spaces on the face of the ngatu must be potupotutatau or symmetrical. Symmetry gives the ngatu two qualities that are integral to any Tongan art: harmony (napanapangamālie) and beauty (kinokinoifie).

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Absence of symmetry threatens the harmony and beauty Tongan artists seek to establish. Asymmetrical elements in the design are likely to create ‘artistic disorder’ and ‘rhythmic tension’ (felekeu). These aspects of ngatu art are not exhaustive, but provide key components for the framework through which one could visualize the interpretive task.

A ngatu-​inspired framework This framework aims not at controlling how one reads. It offers instead some interpretive markers to direct readers’ attention to aspects of texts that may otherwise be ignored or forgotten. As a ngatu-​inspired framework, it has the following markers. The first is what i call the collective marker. This collective marker is based on the idea that ngatu is collectively made for collective purposes. By implication, a text is visualized as a collective product written out of, and for, a particular community. That community provides the platform for the production of texts, and texts simultaneously bear the marks of that community. This collectiveness is traceable in texts, though sometimes subdued. It is the role of the interpreter to look for the collective markers and analyse how they shed light on the text as a whole. Any individual claim in the texts stands in opposition to, and threatens, the well-​being and interests of the collective. For the collective is governed by mutual respect (faka’apa’apa), devotion (mateaki), humility (loto tō) and reciprocity (tauhi vā). The second category is the cultural marker. Ngatu as mentioned earlier is a documentation of culture; it is a Tongan cultural text. By the same token, any text  –​biblical or otherwise  –​is a cultural documentation. A  text does not simply record cultural and social activities; it constructs them at the same time either to reflect or validate status, ranking, identity and belonging. Here the task of an interpreter is to note the cultural markers in texts, seeking to understand their recording of cultural activities, and engaging with their construction of status, identity and belonging. Very often in such a construction, there are claims of domination and ownership; claims that contradict social and cultural harmony.

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The third category is the boundary marker. This category refers to aspects of texts that define spaces. The boundary marker however does not function merely to divide and separate, but to link and connect spaces. By implication, texts do have their own boundaries that define them, but at the same time are linked by those boundaries. Boundaries, in this sense, are not impenetrable barriers; they intersect and cross, thus forming spaces that are either symmetrical (creating harmony) or asymmetrical (creating tension). An interpreter needs to locate the boundary markers in texts. The fourth category is the space marker. Spaces are defined by intersecting boundaries, as in the third category. The Tongan word for space is vā, and it connotes both spaces and relations; hence the word ‘tauhi vā’  –​ keeping spaces or maintaining relations.17 Any violation of space (vā) is also a violation of relation (vā), and vice versa. To maintain good relation is to respect vā. Characteristic of vā in a ngatu is potupotutatau or tatau; tatau is a form of spatial or relational agreement. This agreement bestows on the face of the ngatu some degree of harmony and balance. Where there is no agreement, harmony and balance are both absent. As such, spaces are violated and relations are at risk. To visualize interpretation through ngatu is to look at how spaces and relations are created, maintained and/​or manipulated in texts. It is also assumed that these spaces and relations are ideologically defined. An interpreter’s task is to look at how spaces and relations are constructed and for whose interests. The fifth, and final, category is what i call the depth marker. I use the term ‘depth’ to point attention to another dimension of Tongan arts. Tongan art is four-​dimensional, namely, length (lōloa), width (maukupu), form (fuo) and depth (loloto).18 Loloto (deep/​depth) must not be confused with lolotō (humility). Loloto as deep/​depth also points to something that is unfathomable. The word can be used with reference to the moana (ocean), or an idea that is so deep that one cannot fully comprehend, or to the mythic underworld abode known to Polynesians as Pulotu19 –​ the place where spirits gather and living waters flow, the place that brings forth new life and light. Visualizing texts using the depth marker requires one to look below the surface of texts, or pay attention to the underside. The underside in ngatu-​ making is where patterns are placed and emerge from, as well as giving life to the ngatu. Reading the depth marker in texts requires that one not only look

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Collective marker

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Cultural marker

Boundary marker

Space marker Depth marker

Figure 5.3  Ngatu-​inspired framework and interpretive markers.

for those being relegated to the underside, but also acknowledges their life-​ giving mana. Whereas in much biblical art, life is portrayed as coming from above, or heaven, in Tongan culture and arts, life is essentially from below, from earth. In that sense, a ngatu-​inspired reading takes earth and the interests of earth seriously. These interpretive markers will not only direct my reading of Genesis 1 below, but will also define the limits of both my reading and the ngatu-​inspired framework i have sketched (Figure 5.3).

A ngatu-​inspired reading of Gen. 1.1–​2:4a I will now demonstrate how to use the ngatu-​inspired framework of interpretation by employing the interpretive markers in my reading of Gen. 1.1–​2.4a.

The collective markers This so-​called priestly account of creation has been associated in manifold readings over the years, from various hermeneutical persuasions, with ‘Elohîm as the sole creator of heaven and earth. But a close reading of the text based on its collective markers opens up other possibilities, one of which is the possibility that creation is a result of a collective effort rather than by an individual. Supporting this claim are collective markers that are in the text itself right in front of readers.

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First, the name ‘Elohîm is a collective term; it is always plural unless it refers to the God of Israel. But the singular translation of ‘Elohîm as ‘God’ rather than ‘gods’ is a translation decision based on a particular religious persuasion, though grammatically wrong. In that case, ‘Elohîm can be translated as ‘When the gods began to create the heaven and the earth’. Creation accounts from Israel’s neighbours refer to more than one god doing the creative works. But the translation of this account opted for the singular to serve the translators’ interests and beliefs. Second, earth (‘Eretz)20 is another collective marker in the text. The opening sentence reads: ‘When ‘Elohîm began to create21 heaven and earth’ (1.1 jps).22 This gives the impression that it was ‘Elohim who created ‘Eretz. Verse 2, however, reads otherwise: ‘the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water’. Here ‘Eretz exists, together with the deep (Tehôm) and the water (Hammāyim), prior to God’s creative acts. The reference to ‘a wind from God sweeping over the water’ is ‘Elohim’s first act, which is secondary to ‘Eretz’s existence. There is no reason to deny therefore that ‘Eretz as a subject can be viewed as an active participant in creation; ‘Eretz was ‘Elohîm’s co-​creator. The heaven is nowhere to be seen or heard until 2.1, the completion of creation on the sixth day. Third, if ‘Eretz was ‘Elohîm’s co-​creator, then the repetitive use of the jussive yehî marks an invitation to co-​create rather than a command. The translation of yehî as ‘let there be’ in this case serves as a collective marker. Verse 3 reads: ‘Let there be light, and there was light.’ That stands in contrast to v.2, where darkness was on the face of the deep (‘al-​penê tehôm). Instead of assuming that ‘Elohîm brings light upon that darkness (as most reading of the text do), it is possible to read the verse as ‘Elohîm’s invitation or plea to ‘Eretz to bring forth light out of the deep.23 ‘Elohîm appears to have a problem with the darkness, but that is not the case with ‘Eretz. ‘Eretz offers ‘Elohîm light, but ‘Elohîm goes further and does two things: separates light from darkness, and names them day and night (without ‘Eretz’s permission). This is the pattern with the rest of creation. ‘Elohîm seems to be obsessed with separating and naming. ‘Elohîm invites/​pleas, ‘Eretz responds and then ‘Elohîm goes on to manipulate it without ‘Eretz’s consent. What is clear from this pattern is ‘Elohîm’s creative acts are secondary to what ‘Eretz brings forth.

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When it comes to creation of humans, the language of invitation/​plea changes from the jussive yehî to the cohortative na’aseh, ‘Let us make’ (v.26), and creation changes from bara’ to ‘āsāh. Here, ‘Elohîm seeks to involve first hand alongside ‘Eretz in the act of creation. The plural language of the invitation is unlikely to be referring to a divine council, but to ‘Eretz as co-​creator. Instead of asking ‘Eretz to bring forth humans as in the creation of vegetation and other living creatures, ‘Elohîm wants something more this time; that is, to create a creature in both the tatau (‘image and likeness’; see Havea’s chapter) of ‘Eretz and ‘Elohîm. ‘Eretz alone could have brought forth humans in her24 image and likeness only; but ‘Elohîm pleads with ‘Eretz to add his to the mould as well. Yet, without agreement, ‘Elohîm continues with the behavioural pattern he showed in previous verses. ‘Elohîm ignores ‘Eretz and claims the creation of humans as his, in his image and likeness, and further demonstrates his preoccupation with domination and separation. ‘Elohîm’s act creates tension in the text; there is no respect for ‘Eretz, nor is there reciprocity (tauhi vā). ‘Eretz is cheated and (ab)used for ‘Elohîm’s own interests, and therefore this threatens the harmony of creation itself.25

The boundary markers Gen. 1:1–​2:4a is marked with boundaries. Whereas ‘Eretz brings forth from the deep various parts of creation, ‘Elohîm marks the boundaries on the face of ‘Eretz. The first boundary marks the separation of light from darkness. This is a spatial boundary (vā). This separation is followed by naming, which is a form of control. By naming light and darkness, ‘Elohîm imposes his authority on something that ‘Eretz gifted to creation. Similar patterns occur in vv.6, 9, 14, 20, 24 and 26. Following the separation and naming of light and darkness, ‘Elohîm separated the two waters, below and above, by requesting an expanse to part them. Here again, ‘Elohîm reasserts his authority by naming the expanse Sky. In v.9, ‘Elohîm separates the water below the expanse from dry land, and names them Earth and Seas respectively (v.10). What begins as one body of water, ‘Elohîm has broken and allocated to different spaces. There is further separation in vv.14–​18, where ‘Eretz is once again requested to bring forth more lights for the expanse to carry out the following duties: to set times to days and years, to shine upon ‘Eretz, to separate light from darkness

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(as if the first attempt was not good enough) and to have dominion over the day and night. Here again, domination and separation characterize ‘Elohîm’s actions. Verses 20–​5 focus on the creation of non-​human creatures: sea and air creatures (vv.20–​3), which ‘Elohîm blessed; land-​based creatures (vv.24–​5), which received no blessing. Living creatures have now been allocated to the various spaces ‘Elohîm separated. The second boundary marker is a temporal one and is drawn in terms of days: ‘And there was evening and there was morning, a first day.’ This temporal boundary marker breaks creation into six days, with an additional day as ‘Elohîm’s day of rest. In each day, ‘Eretz is requested to bring forth something new, and ‘Eretz does. Land-​based creatures however share the same day with the creation of the human, and as such, form a relationship that other creatures do not have. Humans connect to the rest of creation by way of being separated into, and named as, male and female. The third boundary marker is the formulaic expression: wayyomer ‘elohîm, ‘And ‘Elohîm said’. This expression occurs ten times (vv.3, 6, 9, 11, 14, 20, 24, 26, 28, 29), and each introduces a different invitation to ‘Eretz from ‘Elohîm to bring forth something different into creation. Everything ‘Eretz brings forth is allocated by ‘Elohîm into different spaces –​sky, dry land, water and air. Verses 28–​9, however, are an anomaly. Here ‘Elohîm interrupts the pattern in previous verses by ignoring his co-​creator ‘Eretz, and speaks only to the newly created humans, his image, male and female. To them, ‘Elohîm offers his blessings, and gives them authority to have dominion over and subdue ‘Eretz and its fullness thereof. This is shocking, given that ‘Eretz has been an active and trustworthy co-​creator of ‘Elohîm. What has ‘Eretz done to warrant such a treatment from ‘Elohîm? What is wrong with ‘Elohîm that he turns against the one who brings forth everything ‘Elohîm asked for? ‘Elohîm becomes a destabilizing force to creation, a traitor to ‘Eretz. From here on, ‘Eretz is no longer spoken to, nor invited to bring forth anything anymore. ‘Eretz as an active subject in creation has now become a mere side note in the story. ‘Eretz is silenced! The fourth boundary marker is marked by the recurring phrase, wayyar’ e ‘ lohîm (and ‘Elohîm saw), which occurs seven times (vv.4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31). Each occurrence is a prelude to ‘Elohîm’s assessment of each creative act, especially ‘Elohîm’s manipulation of what ‘Eretz brings forth. The only

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exception is when ‘Eretz is asked to bring forth vegetation. With no interference, ‘Elohîm saw it was good. Another significant exception links, once again, to the anomalistic creation of humans, where ‘Elohîm claims the act as his own, without ‘Eretz. Instead of the typical assessment ‘it was good’ (kî-​tôv), he elevates his own performance as ‘very good’ (tôv me’ōd). In doing so, ‘Elohîm gives every effort of ‘Eretz in creation a status lower than his own. Creation of humans, and all that involves, is now considered superior to creation of anything prior. Here again, ‘Elohîm causes felekeu (tension). These boundary markers define various spaces in the text in which creation occurs. In contrast to what lines on ngatu symbolize, these boundaries tend to favour separation above connection, domination instead of sharing. Here lines are drawn on the surface of creation for the sake of control. Control and domination are features of ‘Elohîm’s approach to creation.

The space markers Where boundaries are erected, new spaces/​relations (vā) are created. This is the case with lines on a ngatu, so as with boundaries drawn by ‘Elohîm. He draws all boundaries to define, separate and, in many instances, name spaces –​ temporal and spatial, horizontal and vertical. In v.1, two spaces are mentioned:  heaven and earth. If one followed the flow of the text closely, one would notice that ‘Eretz is not only the source for creation, but also brings forth heaven, its lights and firmaments. Though separated, heaven and earth have a reciprocal relationship. ‘Eretz begets heaven, and heaven shines its light upon earth. Another interesting point is the possibility that ‘Elohîm resides with Eretz. There is no evidence in the text to indicate that ‘Elohîm is an other-​worldly being, residing in heaven. But ‘Elohîm sets out to create a space between him and ‘Eretz, possibly to set him apart from ‘Eretz. Likewise, ‘Elohîm shows no interest in maintaining his vā with ‘Eretz. Once he received what he requested from ‘Eretz, ‘Elohîm becomes a being unto himself. He acts to serve his own interests and that is strongly evident in giving humans, the ones he claims as his own handiwork, authority over all that ‘Eretz has gifted him. From a Tongan perspective, ‘Elohîm has failed to maintain his vā with ‘Eretz, and thereby robbed creation of the harmony and balance it needs.

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The cultural markers Visualizing texts through cultural markers requires that attention be paid to the fact that texts are designed and painted (like ngatu) to validate status, mark identity and establish belonging. Likewise, texts are encoded with claims of domination and control that are in opposition to social harmony. In short, texts (like ngatu) are expressions and documentation of culture. The first cultural marker is expressed through the relationship (vā) between ‘Elohîm and ‘Eretz as mentioned earlier. The text is woven in a way to portray ‘Elohîm as superior in terms of status, rank and power over ‘Eretz. Whatever ‘Eretz brings forth, ‘Elohîm has the liberty to manipulate in any way ‘Elohîm wishes. When light is brought forth, ‘Elohîm grabs it, separates it from darkness and then names it. That becomes a characteristic pattern throughout the text. Possibly, ‘Elohîm is threatened by the creative power of ‘Eretz and thus attempts to stamp his own identity on creation. Another possible reading would be that ‘Elohîm feared being assimilated into Eretz, and so tried to establish his own sense of belonging. The second cultural marker is expressed through the creative acts of ‘Eretz and ‘Elohîm. Whereas ‘Eretz acts to bring forth creation from below, ‘Elohîm imposes his acts from above. Likewise, whereas ‘Eretz shares with ‘Elohîm whatever is brought forth, ‘Elohîm claims them for himself with his own creative twists. Like the first marker, this is possibly an attempt by ‘Elohîm to validate his own status in relation to ‘Eretz, and to clearly mark who he is. The third cultural marker points to the creation of humans vis-​à-​vis ‘Eretz and other living creatures. The creation of humans in the tatau (image and likeness) of ‘Elohîm gives humans a status that is not given to other creatures. But there is a political element behind this cultural positioning of humans. That is, humans are given that status only because ‘Elohîm claims them as his own creation without ‘Eretz’s participation. For that reason, humans are specially blessed with the power to dominate and subdue ‘Eretz and everything that ‘Eretz took part in its creation. It is not surprising therefore that ‘Elohîm assesses what he saw on the sixth day as ‘very good’. The fourth, and final, example of cultural markers is documented in the consecration of a special day as ‘Elohîm’s day of rest, the Sabbath (Gen. 2.2–​3). This event happens post creation, because according to the text the creation of

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heaven and earth has completed on the sixth day. Why does ‘Elohîm need a special day of rest? According to Gen. 1.2–​3, ‘Elohîm deserves to have such a day, because he alone created heaven and earth. This claim needs to be challenged, because ‘Eretz, despite being ignored and silenced by ‘Elohîm, brings a lot into creation, and therefore deserves a consecrated day of rest too. ‘Eretz is sacred! ‘Eretz needs a break!

The depth markers In this final analysis, my reading of Genesis 1 will be guided by the depth markers. The depth marker category is rooted in the idea that designs on the faces of ngatu are determined by pre-​made patterns placed at the underside during the ngatu-​making process. By analogy, every text has an underside where significant subjects reside yet are largely absent from interpretation, and neglected by readers. There are three subjects at the underside of creation, and they function in this reading as depth markers. Each one of them plays a significant role, but they are given no voices and no acknowledgement. The first subject is ‘Eretz, and i have discussed her involvement in creation and her status as co-​creator alongside ‘Elohîm. Gen. 1.1–​2.4a, however, is framed with a claim that it is about the creation of ‘Eretz (and heaven) by ‘Elohîm’ (1.1; 2.1). To support that claim, ‘Eretz is depicted as formless and void (tōhû wāvohû), and in need of ‘Elohîm’s intervention. As noted earlier, ‘Elohîm is possibly earthly, and in that sense bears the image and likeness (the tatau) of ‘Eretz. If that’s the case, then humans were created in the image and likeness of ‘Eretz too (as attested in 2.7), rather than in the image and likeness of ‘Elohîm alone, as the asymmetrical part of the text claims. The second marker is the deep (Tehôm). Tehôm, from beginning to end, remains at the underside and is associated with darkness. Like ‘Eretz, Tehôm is not mentioned in a positive way, but as one to be separated and ignored. From a Tongan standpoint, Tehôm is a source of life; a sacred place that gives new life to the dead and light to the living. As the pattern on the face of a ngatu emerges from below, so also life in creation emerges from Tehôm. Tehôm gives life! The third subject at the underside is the waters (Hammāyim). Hammāyim are painted as inanimate, awaiting the life-​giving force of ‘a wind from ‘Elohîm’

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(1.2; cf. 2.7). Like Tehôm, Hammāyim are positioned in relation to ‘Elohîm’s power, and thereby become vulnerable to ‘Elohîm’s disruptive acts in creation. Hammāyim however in ngatu-​making give life to the barkcloth by its being soaked in them, thus enabling the barkcloth to become flexible enough for its transformation into a ngatu. Hammāyim again are an Oceanic symbol of fluidity, vastness and depth. Simply put, Oceania is watery. Water is a key marker of Oceanic identity. It is a source of food for islanders in Oceania; it defines who we are, and gives us a sense of belonging. Hammāyim, the moana, is our home! When ‘Elohîm sweeps over, divides and separates Hammāyim, it is threatening, because such intrusion reminds us of harmful climate change (such as cyclones in Vanuatu and Fiji) and sea levels rising in Oceania (such as in Kiribati and Tuvalu). Oceania needs no more wind from ‘Elohîm over our waters! Our water, the moana, is already full of life!

Where to from here? The goal of this work thus far is to establish a ngatu-​inspired framework for biblical interpretation. With the five key interpretive components of the framework, the conversation on the bible and art is now soaked in the salty waters of Oceania. Employing the ngatu-​inspired framework in the reading of Gen. 1.1–​ 2.4a demonstrates the kind of insights that such a non-​conventional reading could bring. Whether or not this framework could work in other texts is yet to be tested. But it marks the beginning of a voyage, and i am inviting readers from Oceania, and other places too, to get into this vaka (canoe) and explore the possibilities Oceanic arts and readers are gifting to biblical scholarship.

Notes 1. This work features some ideas that emerged out of many talanoa (conversations) with Jione Havea about Tongan arts, and specifically about ngatu and tātatau design. Our two chapters in this volume intersect at various points. 2. I use ‘bible’ not ‘Bible’ in this work because I consider our own indigenous ‘texts’ as scriptural and sacred, and they should therefore be given similar treatment.

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3. I am following Jione Havea’s lead (see Havea’s chapter in this volume) in using the lowercase ‘i’ (except at the beginning of a sentence) rather than ‘I,’ because, like Havea, ‘i also use the lowercase with you, she, we, he, they, it and others.’ This shift to Havea marks three things: (i) an affirmation that i (as individual) do not exist without relating to others, (ii) a resistance against the privileging of the so-​ called independent modern self and (iii) a sign of his rebellion against the colonial English language. See also Havea, ‘Reciprocate: Learning [in] Islandic-​Oceanic Style’, in Life-​Enhancing Learning Together (Nam-​gu, Daegu: Oikotree, 2016), 359. In addition to Havea’s three reasons, i prefer the lowercase because the views presented herein are conditioned and limited by my individual ‘i’/​‘eye’. I view things differently, and cannot claim that i speak for or on behalf of anyone but myself. 4. For information in Tongan arts, see Paul van der Grijp, ‘Women’s Handicrafts and Men’s Arts: The Production of Material Culture in the Polynesian Kingdom of Tonga’, Journal de la Société des océanistes 97, no. 2 (1993): 159–​69. See also Phyllis Herda, ‘The Changing Texture of Textiles in Tonga’, The Journal of the Polynesian Society 108, no. 2 (1999): 149–​67. 5. The use of the word ‘inspired’ carries with it the idea that our arts are sacred, have life of their own and symbolize in many ways our Oceanic view of life (as cyclical), as well as the way we live in our societies. There is no allusion here whatsoever to the Christian concept of inspiration. 6. This is one of the major drivers behind the establishment of the Oceania Biblical Studies Association (OBSA), which is a fellowship for those who are serious about reading scriptures from the context of Oceania. Publications that have emerged out of this context include Nāsili Vaka’uta, Reading Ezra 9–​10 Tu’a-​ wise: Rethinking Biblical Interpretation in Oceania (Atlanta: SBL, 2011); and Jione Havea et al., Bible, Borders, Belonging(s): Engaging Readings from Oceania (Atlanta: SBL, 2014). 7. One of the earliest reports about ngatu is from the time of Captain James Cook. See Fanny Wonu Veys, ‘Barkcloth in Tonga, 1773–​1900: Presenting the Past in the Present’, Journal of Museum Ethnography 17 (2005): 101–​17. 8. This applies also to Oceanic tatau or tātatau (tattoo). The ethnicity of a person with a tattoo can be identified based on the design she or he wears. Those of mixed ethnicities tend to wear mixed patterns as identity markers (see Jione Havea’s chapter on tatau in this volume). 9. For more information on ngatu-​making, see Valamotu Palu, ‘Tapa Making in Tonga: A Metaphor for God’s Care’, in Weavings: Women Doing Theology in Oceania, ed. Lydia Johnson and Joan Alleluia Filemoni-​Tofaeono (Suva: IPS/​ SPATS, 2003), 62–​71.

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10. Jess Durkin, ‘Tapa as Documentation of Culture’, Tapa: Unwrapping Polynesian Barkcloth, 2013, available online: http://​www.iub.edu/​~iuam/​online_​modules/​ barkcloth/​essays/​tapa-​doc-​culture/​. 11. Emma Kessler, ‘Tapa and Dance’, Tapa: Unwrapping Polynesian Barkcloth, 2013, available online: http://​www.iub.edu/​~iuam/​online_​modules/​barkcloth/​ essays/​tapa-​and-​dance/​. 12. Durkin, ‘Tapa as Documentation of Culture’. Also Ping-​Ann Addo, ‘We Pieced Together Cloth, We Pieced Together Culture: Reflections on Tongan Women’s Textile-​Making in Oakland’, in Textile Society of America 9th Biennial Symposium (2004), 352–​9, available online: http://​digitalcommons.unl.edu/​ tsaconf/​index.5.html#year_​2004352-​59. 13. Ricardo Luz, ‘Ngatu, the Tongan Tapa: A Bridge between Traditional Tongan Values and Contemporary Urban New Zealand’, Journals from Oceania: An Anthropology and Art History Blog from Aotearoa New Zealand, 12 October 2014, available online: http://​journalsfromoceania.com/​ngatu-​the-​tongan-​ tapa-​a-​bridge-​between-​traditional-​tongan-​values-​and-​contemporary-​urban-​ new-​zealand/​. 14. Ibid. 15. Like other materialized components of culture, ngatu (and tatau) has not escaped commodification. For many people, ngatu-​making is a source of income, and as hiapo becomes scarce, foreign materials are used. Most of the traditional patterns and designs are preserved, but new motifs are also added for different purposes. The larger the size, the higher the price for ngatu. This affects Tongans in negative ways. If one cannot make a ngatu, one has to be rich to afford one. If not, one has to borrow money to fulfil one’s cultural duty. See Ping-​Ann Ado and Niko Besnier, ‘When Gifts become Commodities: Pawnshops, Valuables, and Shame in Tonga and the Tongan Diaspora’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14 (2008): 39–​59. 16. Dorothy K. Billings, ‘Lines That Connect: Rethinking Pattern and Mind in the Pacific’, Anthropological Forum 22 (2012): 301–​303. 17. Tēvita ‘O. Ka’ili, ‘Tauhi vā: Nurturing Tongan Sociospatial Ties in Maui and Beyond’, The Contemporary Pacific 17 (2005), 83–​114. 18. ‘Okusitino Māhina, ‘Art as tā-​vā “Time-​Space” Transformation’, in Researching the Pacific and Indigenous Peoples: Issues and Perspectives, ed. T. Baba et al. (Auckland: Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Auckland, 2004), 86–​93. 19. Paul Geraghty, ‘Pulotu, Polynesian Homeland’, Journal of the Polynesian Society 102 (1993): 343–​84. 20. I am treating the terms ‘Elohîm, ‘Eretz, Hammāyim and Tehôm as proper names here, hence the capitalization and non-​use of italics.

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21. The use of the word bara’ here for creation can be read as moulding or reshaping what is already there, rather than inventing something that never before existed. 22. All translations of biblical texts are from the Jewish Publication Society (JPS) translation (1985) unless otherwise indicated. 23. It is worth noting here that in Polynesian cultures, light does not come from above, but from the deep, from Pulotu, where there is life and living water (see comments later). 24. I am using the feminine pronoun ‘her’ because ‘Eretz is a feminine noun. Similarly, ‘Elohîm is masculine, so i use the masculine pronoun. 25. An issue of gender discrimination is also implied. Given that ‘Elohîm is masculine and ‘Eretz feminine, the actions of ‘Elohîm violates ‘Eretz right to creation. But there is a twist: despite ‘Elohîm’s attempt to rob the creation of humans from ‘Eretz, the end product bears both their tatau (image/​likeness), male and female (1.27). In this case, various reading options emerge. First, it is possible that both ‘Eretz and ‘Elohîm co-​created humans, but the latter claimed them as his own. Second, it is also possible that ‘Elohîm –​likely to be an ‘Eretz-​born being himself –​cannot avoid having ‘Eretz’s likeness on what he created, because he has ‘Eretz’s DNA, so to speak. Third, and finally, if we disregard the first two, then the only option left is to portray ‘Elohîm as both male and female –​queer in a sense.

Bibliography Addo, Ping-​Ann. ‘We Pieced Together Cloth, We Pieced Together Culture: Reflections on Tongan Women’s Textile-​making in Oakland’. Textile Society of America 9th Biennial Symposium (2004), 352–​9. Available online: http://​digitalcommons.unl.edu/​tsaconf/​index.5.html#year_​2004. Addo, Ping-​Ann, and Niko Besnier. ‘When Gifts Become Commodities: Pawnshops, Valuables, and Shame in Tonga and the Tongan Diaspora’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14 (2008): 39–​59. Billings, Dorothy K. ‘Lines That Connect: Rethinking Pattern and Mind in the Pacific’. Anthropological Forum 22 (2012): 301–​303. Durkin, Jess. ‘Tapa as Documentation of Culture’. Tapa: Unwrapping Polynesian Barkcloth. Indiana: Indiana University Art Museum, 2013. Available online: http://​www.iub.edu/​~iuam/​online_​modules/​barkcloth/​essays/​tapa-​doc-​ culture/​.

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Geraghty, Paul. ‘Pulotu, Polynesian Homeland’. Journal of the Polynesian Society 102 (1993): 343–​84. Havea, Jione. ‘Reciprocate: Learning [in] Islandic-​Oceanic Style.’ In Life-​Enhancing Learning Together. Daegu: Oikotree, 2016. Havea, Jione, David J. Neville, and Elaine M. Wainwright (eds.). Bible, Borders, Belonging(s): Engaging Readings from Oceania. Atlanta: SBL, 2014. Herda, Phyllis. ‘The Changing Texture of Textiles in Tonga’. Journal of the Polynesian Society 108, no. 2 (1999): 149–​67. Ka’ili, Tēvita ‘O. ‘Tauhi vā: Nurturing Tongan Sociospatial Ties in Maui and Beyond’. The Contemporary Pacific 17 (2005): 83–​114. Kessler, Emma. ‘Tapa and Dance’. In Tapa: Unwrapping Polynesian Barkcloth. 2013. Available online: http://​www.iub.edu/​~iuam/​online_​modules/​barkcloth/​essays/​ tapa-​and-​dance/​. Luz, Ricardo. ‘Ngatu, the Tongan Tapa: A Bridge between Traditional Tongan Values and Contemporary Urban New Zealand’. 12 October 2014. In Journals from Oceania: An Anthropology and Art History Blog from Aotearoa New Zealand. Available online: http://​journalsfromoceania.com/​ngatu-​the-​tongan-​tapa-​a-​ bridge-​between-​traditional-​tongan-​values-​and-​contemporary-​urban-​new-​ zealand/​. Māhina, ‘Okusitino. ‘Art as tā-​vā “Time-​Space” Transformation.’ In Researching the Pacific and Indigenous Peoples: Issues and Perspectives, edited by T. Baba, O. Mahina, N. Williams and U. Nabobo-​Baba, 86–​93. Auckland: Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Auckland, 2004. Palu, Valamotu. ‘Tapa Making in Tonga: A Metaphor for God’s Care’. In Weavings: Women Doing Theology in Oceania, edited by Lydia Johnson and Joan Alleluia Filemoni-​Tofaeono, 62–​71. Suva: IPS/​SPATS, 2003. Vaka’uta, Nāsili. Reading Ezra 9–​10 Tu’a-​wise: Rethinking Biblical Interpretation in Oceania. Atlanta: SBL, 2011. Van der Grijp, Paul. ‘Women’s Handicrafts and Men’s Arts: The Production of Material Culture in the Polynesian Kingdom of Tonga’. Journal de la Société des océanistes 97, no. 2 (1993): 159–​69. Veys, Fanny Wonu. ‘Barkcloth in Tonga, 1773–​1900: Presenting the Past in the Present’. Journal of Museum Ethnography 17 (2005): 101–​17.

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Sister Gael O’Leary A Road Less Travelled Robin Woodward

Gael O’Leary, sculptor, painter and print maker, took her vows as a Sister of Mercy at Auckland, New Zealand, in 1969.1 Therefore it should come as no surprise that the subject matter of her art is informed by the Christian narrative. O’Leary’s content is sourced from the Bible and the history of the Catholic Church in Australia and New Zealand; her themes are those of social conscience and her style is essentially representational. Sister Gael’s life as an artist was never easy (Figure 6.1). To work as an artist requires access to paints and canvases, or in the case of a sculptor, materials in which to model or carve. How does a Sister of Mercy, who has no personal possessions and who has taken a vow of poverty, access such materials? Then there was the uneasy peace between the Sister and her Congregation with regard her life as a nun and artist. The Congregation needed Sister Gael to carry her weight in her Community, particularly in terms of earning her keep. To them, teaching seemed a likely career path for the young nun; Sister Gael, however, believed that her vocation was to minister through her art, using the visual arts to give contemporary form to the Christian story. To this end she ultimately succeeded in persuading her Congregational Leadership Team to let her enrol at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne University, an opportunity that opened doors for her in Australia and led to commissions for large-​scale works for churches and religious institutions. However, throughout her journey, Sister Gael became increasingly disillusioned with the Catholic Church, particularly with regard to its attitude to

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Figure 6.1  Gael O’Leary with her bronze sculpture Come Sit Awhile, 2013–​14.

women. Thus in 2009 she petitioned to be released from her vows. It was a formidable leap of faith for a woman in her sixties who had lived a sheltered life for over forty years, a woman who had never owned personal property, or a personal bank account, cheque book or credit card. Of even greater concern for O’Leary was the possibility that this move might alienate potential patrons, particularly those affiliated to Catholic institutions. This in fact did not eventuate; commissions for work continue to flow in. This is a life story of faith –​but many of O’Leary’s earliest memories are of art. She vividly remembers a low white tent catching her attention as a child. It was set up over a large hole in the footpath outside her home and a man in overalls was working inside it. O’Leary was about four years old at the time and can remember crouching down to peer inside, fascinated by the scramble of coloured wires. As the technician snipped, reconnected and redirected pathways, the youngster gathered up the leftover wires and scuttled

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home with her booty. She spent hours twisting the plastic-​covered wires into shapes and forms. This is Gael O’Leary’s first memory of making sculpture.2 Since then she has rarely been without modelling tools, paintbrush or drawing crayon, even during the forty-​two years that she spent in religious life as a Sister of Mercy. Through her art O’Leary expresses her faith as well as questioning it. The catalyst for this was the grief she experienced at the death of her father in 1975. Exploring Christ’s story, his life, death and resurrection, was a way to find some meaning in her personal suffering, and more universally, in that of the human condition. She determined to give expression to it in a way that is relevant to today’s world. Overall though, such expository works are balanced throughout O’Leary’s oeuvre by lighter, more whimsical sculptures which are equally an expression of her being. Gael O’Leary entered St Mary’s Convent, Auckland, in 1967 and took her first vows as a Sister of Mercy two years later. While living at St Mary’s she taught at St Mary’s College, Ponsonby, in 1974 and 1975, followed by two years at St Patrick’s College in neighbouring Freemans Bay. There was precious little time for O’Leary to explore her creativity during these years, and nowhere at St Mary’s to set up a studio. However a large basement area adjoined the College Archives, and it was there that she used to escape late at night to paint. There was one other night owl, an Oxford graduate and poet, archivist Sister Veronica Delaney, who retreated to the basement in order to write. Sister Veronica encouraged O’Leary in her art; she also introduced her to the works of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and to the word ‘inscape’, used to describe Hopkins’s exploration of the unique essence or inner nature of a person, event or place.3 O’Leary immediately identified with this theme. Although she was initially a painter, O’Leary began to experiment with sculpture in the late 1970s. She practised with solder and galvanized iron, as well as a new medium, two part epoxy which would harden when mixed, and would hold a modelled shape. However, the epoxy frustrated O’Leary because she could not get it to do what she wanted. Seeing this, Sister Veronica casually mentioned one night that her friend, Robert Field, had begun working in this new medium: would O’Leary like to meet him? Field was a nationally recognized sculptor, who had recently completed the large sculpture Risen Christ for the façade of the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Parnell, Auckland.4 He willingly

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spent time with the young aspiring artist, explaining his working method and showing her works he had made out of the two-​part epoxy. While Field was of practical assistance, it was New Zealand’s foremost painter, Colin McCahon, who shared O’Leary’s approach to art as an exploration of faith.5 McCahon encouraged and influenced her journey when she interviewed him for her university assignment on his Stations of the Cross series (1965–​66). McCahon talked about faith, art and the expression of faith in art; it was all music to O’Leary’s ears. In these early years, as she juggled to balance her life of faith and art, O’Leary would be challenged constantly. At the end of 1977 she was informed by her superiors that she was being transferred to Carmel Convent and would be teaching at her former high school, Carmel College, on Auckland’s North Shore. O’Leary was both excited and dismayed by this decision; she said ‘going back there felt like a full circle, but I  knew there was no physical space for me to set up an art studio at Carmel’. At first O’Leary set up a studio in the Convent’s old chicken coop, but the structure was so precarious that it literally disintegrated one night during a storm. Next, she lighted upon the area used to store the Community’s garden implements; that space served her well for the following four years. While continuing to teach, sculpt and paint, in 1981 O’Leary enrolled as a master of arts student in the Department of Art History at the University of Auckland. Her study was interrupted within a few months, however, when she was selected by her Congregation to join the New Zealand delegation to the first international meeting of the Sisters of Mercy, to be held later that year in Dublin. En route to Dublin, the delegation travelled to Rome where O’Leary’s superiors had meetings to attend; O’Leary spent her time exploring the art treasures of the Vatican. It was at the Museum of Modern Religious Art in the Vatican that O’Leary had an epiphany. Standing in front of internationally acclaimed Modernist works by artists who had sought to give expression to the life and message of Christ, she recognized her calling: to give a contemporary interpretation to the gospel message through the medium of art. She says that she knew ‘with every fibre of my being that this was to be my path’. O’Leary also knew that if she was to follow her calling, she needed a bigger and more suitable studio space. She was well aware that trying to paint

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in the damp, poorly lit space under the convent was hampering her artistic development. A  way forward emerged the following year, facilitated by her first foray into public art. In exchange for having her MA thesis typed, O’Leary painted an extensive mural on the exterior wall of a fruit and vegetable shop in Takapuna, Auckland.6 Finding the time to paint, in addition to her teaching and ministry duties, was also a mission, so she worked on the mural late at night, under lights. On site one evening, O’Leary was approached by a local businessman asking if she would be interested in painting another public mural, this time on a building in the neighbouring borough of Devonport. O’Leary was delighted; Devonport was her old stamping ground  –​she had spent her childhood there. The Devonport mural was O’Leary’s first commercial enterprise. She costed out the commission and charged for it, although any money she earned went directly into the convent coffers. However, ever the entrepreneur, O’Leary looked to access this payment so that she could improve on her cramped painting quarters. Deciding that a standard double garage with electricity and running water would best suit her needs for a studio, she proceeded to obtain quotes for either relocating an old building or erecting one from scratch. Feeling confident about her cause she wrote to her Congregational Team, documenting her religious art journey to date. She asked if the $4,000 received for the Devonport mural could be put towards a basic studio space. As she explains, ‘My epiphany in Rome surely meant that God was on my side –​how could they refuse?’ Refuse they did. The request was deemed too individualistic and too expensive. Her Congregational leaders wanted O’Leary to focus on her teaching, not her art. She was devastated –​and felt confused. Anger and resentment began to build. Needing spiritual guidance, she turned to a Cenacle nun for help and was introduced to the Prayer of Surrender –​in essence, ‘I give up running into locked doors, and wait for you. You will open them.’7 For O’Leary, this was no easy task: ‘How I railed against that prayer! Too much was being asked of me, but with tears rolling down my face I stumbled through the prayer as best I could.’ What happened next is the harbinger of a pattern in O’Leary’s life. Two hours after her supplication, she received a telephone call from a parent of one of her students. He had a portable site-​office that he no longer had a use

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for: would she like it? He would gift it to the Order, which would have to pay only for the cost of moving the building onto the convent grounds. An electrician and a plumber both agreed to work in exchange for paintings by O’Leary. In effect, the entire building could be funded by the $4,000 she had charged for the Devonport mural. This proved to be an offer that her Leadership Team could not bring itself to refuse. Once she had the space to do so, O’Leary began painting in earnest. Stylistically, her early paintings, such as Three Marys at the Tomb (1986), show the influence of McCahon, particularly in the use of colour symbolism and the simplicity of the figures. In terms of theme and content, these have a strong focus on social justice, exemplified by subject matter drawn from the Bible. This theme continued in the work O’Leary completed in 1987 for her diploma of printmaking at Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design, Auckland, and in her sculpture. Throughout the 1980s, in tandem with painting and printmaking, O’Leary continued to create three-​dimensional and relief sculpture using epoxy resin. She was never totally satisfied with that material, however, and decided to explore bronze as a medium. Working in bronze would ultimately become O’Leary’s metier, but the material is costly, the working method fastidious and the casting technique requires specialist facilities. In 1985, she modelled a clay relief sculpture of the Good Samaritan and took it to Art Works Studio in New Lynn, Auckland, to have it cast in bronze. Once again, money –​or rather the lack of it –​was a problem. As a Sister in a religious community, O’Leary had no personal money, and so she could not pay to have her clay model cast in bronze. Given the circumstances, Frank Watson, the foundryman and owner of Art Works, cast the piece gratis and offered to teach O’Leary the process of lost-​wax casting. So began a professional relationship that would continue for more than eight years. At weekends, during school holidays and in any spare time that she could garner, O’Leary would be at the foundry, learning to cast in bronze. All the small bronze works for Emmaus, her first solo exhibition in 1986,8 were cast at Art Works; so too were her first commissioned pieces of sculpture.9 A defining moment in O’Leary’s struggle to reconcile her art with religious life came in 1987 while she was working on the first of these commissions, the Return of the Prodigal, for St Mary’s Catholic Church, Northcote, Auckland.

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O’Leary was called into the Congregational Offices and was asked to ‘drop everything’ to go to teach in Samoa. Contrary to expectations, O’Leary declined to go; she was committed to the Northcote commission and was equally resolute that teaching secondary school in Samoa was not her calling. Moreover, she was astounded to realize that her work as an artist was held in such slight regard by her Congregation. Her decision was accepted grudgingly, and she was strongly reprimanded for her lack of cooperation and for putting her personal needs before those of the Congregation. To reinforce the point, she was sent a disapproving letter which, for her edification, cited examples of Sisters who had made personal sacrifices for the greater good of the Congregation. This was just one of many signs indicating that O’Leary’s vision of her vocation was not shared by her Congregation. Another point of contention that arose between O’Leary and her faith community centred around her early paintings. These were always controversial, especially in relation to the Catholic Church and particularly with regard to women’s roles within the Church. Woman Damned (1991) (Figure  6.2) strongly references Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (1426–​27) but in O’Leary’s painting, Adam is shown holding the apple. The pair (Eve really), are being cast out by the hierarchical Church which is symbolized by figures representing the male power-​base, standing on the heads of anguished women. This strong visual expression of a theological opinion at variance with the official viewpoint –​that Eve was the primary catalyst for humanity’s ‘fall’ –​ caused a considerable stir. The work had its basis in O’Leary’s personal experience of the Church, referencing specifically the situation of a colleague, a Sister who, after more than thirty years, had decided to leave her Order because of the intransigent position of the Church in its attitudes to the role of women. Seven years later, in 1998, Woman Damned was used by the World Council of Churches in celebration of International Women’s Day. Woman Damned was not O’Leary’s first overt critique of the Church’s attitude towards women. Birthed from the Womb of God (1987) was even more contentious. O’Leary painted this canvas to illustrate a text by an Australian nun who was to present a paper to the Catholic Bishops of Australia on the topic of celebrating the feminine in God. When she was in chapel praying one morning, O’Leary saw an image of God the Creator as a woman giving birth and felt compelled to paint the vision. At that time, a nun from her Community

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Figure 6.2  Gael O’Leary, Woman Damned, detail, 1991.

was working with unmarried mothers at Auckland’s Salvation Army Bethany Centre. O’Leary thus saw this as an opportunity to locate source material that would assist her with this project:  ‘I knew I  couldn’t get to a live birth but through her I was able to get hold of several films on birth and I used these as a reference.’ While Birthed from the Womb of God was on her easel, O’Leary was interviewed for an article in the Anglican magazine, Accent. When the reporter arrived at the studio she took one look at the extremely confronting painting and was conflicted. She needed an image to accompany her article, but could she really use this one? The editorial board of Accent then invited O’Leary to write an article specifically on the painting. The reaction was immense. The work was even brought to the attention of the Pope, via a letter to the Apostolic Delegate sent by a right-​wing Catholic group, Catholics United for the Faith. Vitriolic letters from conservative Christians

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poured in, but these were outweighed by letters from women throughout the country who, as mothers, identified with this image of God as woman. In the midst of all of this, the painting was rejected by the Catholic Bishops of Australia. Thus, in religious life, O’Leary constantly felt like a square peg in a round hole. Although she was part of a centuries old tradition of religious adherents who used art to impart faith, she struggled to have the Church and her Congregation recognize her art as ministry and to accept her as an artist. Some progress was made in the mid-​1980s when she met an Australian Brigidine nun, Sister Dorothea Pini, who invited her to Australia to work on retreats and thus enable O’Leary to use her art as a prayer medium.10 For the next six years, while continuing to teach, O’Leary worked with Sister Dorothea, priests and other members of religious communities, providing retreats throughout New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific.11 Although she continued to paint throughout these years, O’Leary always knew that she was deviating from her vocation. The situation came to a head late in 1990 when she was called into the Congregational Offices and asked to choose between her art and her retreat work. It was another crossroads, and once again, O’Leary made the decision to continue with her art  –​yet, once again, her choice was not well received. O’Leary was reminded that, having made the decision to follow the path of an artist, she was expected not only to support herself by means of her art, but also to make a financial contribution to her Congregation through her creative practice. O’Leary’s heart sank: how could she possibly earn enough? A large number of her paintings had been made into cards, which had sold well in New Zealand, Australia and the United States, but the income was relatively small. Once more, a way forward presented itself. In mid-​1991, O’Leary received an invitation to Brisbane, to discuss the possibility of a bronze sculpture for the city’s new Mater Misericordiae Private Hospital.12 The Mater nursing community wanted a sculpture that reflected their history and ministry, one that also spoke of their social values. Sister Gael, a Sister of Mercy and sculptor, was a perfect fit for this commission. Soon after the meeting, O’Leary awoke one morning with the Hebrew words raḥămîm (compassion) and ḥesed (mercy) ringing in her ears. She knew then that the Mater work would have a strong scriptural base, and immediately outlined her vision in a sketch. This initial

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Figure 6.3  Gael O’Leary, Mercy Bronze, detail, 1992.

layout was used with little modification for the final composition of Mercy Bronze, a relief sculpture composed in a series of eighteen panels. For her design of Mercy Bronze, O’Leary worked with New Testament scholar Professor Elaine Wainwright, R.S.M., who provided the Hebrew Bible and New Testament references that were a springboard for the design of the various panels. One panel depicts an Australian Aboriginal group in a landscape that has Uluru (Ayers Rock) in the background (Figure 6.3). It signifies the call to be reconciled with, and to live in relationship with, the indigenous people of Australia, an ethnic minority who are one of the most disadvantaged in the land. Alongside it, a panel showing the return of the Prodigal Son (based on the parable in Lk. 15.11–​32) represents a moment of reconciliation and forgiveness. O’Leary’s process is always inclusive and consultative. For the Brisbane Mercy Bronze she turned to local Aboriginal elders who asserted that the images must include ‘the land because we are a dispossessed people, the elders because they hold our culture, and the young because they are the hope for the future’. This was the first of O’Leary’s works in which she related the Gospel story to a contemporary situation. It was also the first of her large biblical sculptures that she populated with contemporary Antipodean figures. In her

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translation of traditional narratives into a commentary on modern society, she consistently employed people, young and old, from the immediate community as models for figures in her sculpture. During the year that O’Leary worked on the Brisbane sculpture, she realized that if she wanted to develop her art, she would need further training. While she had an MA in art history and a diploma in printmaking, she did not actually have a degree in fine arts –​she was mostly self-​taught. By now O’Leary had spent more than twenty years in the Convent and was due for some form of professional development or sabbatical. Most of the Sisters took that as an opportunity to further their studies in scripture and/​or spirituality; therefore it was with some trepidation that O’Leary asked the Leadership Team if she could undertake a fine arts degree. On reflection, she suggests, ‘I think I had worn them down, because they agreed.’ In 1994, O’Leary enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programme at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), Melbourne University, majoring in sculpture. She relished the creative environment at VCA; it was a life-​changing opportunity, exposing her to new trends, techniques and mediums in sculpture and, just as importantly, broadening her life experience. Jock Clutterbuck and David Wilson of the Sculpture Department were inspirational teachers.13 Clutterbuck, a practising Sufi, was particularly open-​minded about all religions and included comparative religious studies in his graduate programme. O’Leary came to regard Catholicism in a new light, to see it as part of a spectrum of shared mythologies –​one of many paths to God. On a practical level, during her two years at VCA, O’Leary began to explore sculpting in a variety of materials, including plaster and glass, silicon and steel, wood and found objects. She also experimented with the plaster bandage technique of life-​casting, using fellow students as models. One of the results was Carapace (1994), part of a series of pieces that explore the notion of the body, age and ‘presence in absence’. Carapace is a figurative sculpture in a ‘shell’ of two overlapping halves made of plaster and glass. A life-​size figure of an old woman, capturing the pathos of old age, was built up in clay and placed within the two moulds which were painted with mother of pearl. The front ‘shell’ was strengthened by church-​like buttresses inserted with fine pieces of coloured glass, in the manner of stained glass windows. Influenced by the drawings of artist Kathe Kollwitz, Carapace is a tribute to O’Leary’s mother, in recognition

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of her indomitable spirit and honouring her age and the inner beauty that enlivened her being. Buttressed by the Church, such women are its fortress. Carapace can be seen in the continuum of O’Leary’s exploration of ideas around women and the Church. Increasingly this theme began to predominate in her work. In Real Presence (1995), she used steel to form an arch-​like structure which she shaped inside a plaster bandage body-​cast that she had made of a fellow student. In a second-​hand shop, she found an old red sanctuary lamp of the type used in Catholic churches to signify the ‘real presence’ of Christ in the tabernacle. This O’Leary filled with oil and had the lamp burning inside the representation of the female body, a real presence so long ignored by the Church. After leaving art school, O’Leary and another Sister of Mercy, Margaret Broadbent, established a joint Australia/​New Zealand venture of the Sisters of Mercy, the Mercy Art and Creativity Centre. Here, both painting and sculpture classes were held, and O’Leary had a studio big enough to create the large-​ scale commissions which began to come her way. After operating for eight years, the Centre closed, and in its place, in 2004, the Mercy Sculpture Centre was established, under the auspices of the Auckland Sisters of Mercy. In the interim, O’Leary had begun to receive some significant commissions. Late in 1999 she was approached by her own Mercy Congregation in Auckland to create a sculpture to celebrate its sesquicentenary (Figure 6.4).14 Given the sculptor’s chequered history with her Congregation during her attempts to establish herself as an artist, this approach was both an affirmation and a challenge. Considering the origins of the Order and the directions in which the Auckland Congregation had recently moved, O’Leary decided that the sculpture should be about journeying, partnership and relationships, all of which were an integral part of the mission of the Auckland Congregation. She began by designing the base of the work in the form of a wave, incorporating elements of Celtic design as well as the koru, a spiral shape based on the form of a young, unfurling silver fern frond that signifies new life, growth, strength and peace. The wave symbolizes the journey made 150 years earlier by eight courageous women who travelled by sea from Carlow, Ireland, to Auckland. They came in response to a plea sent to Bishop Pompallier by a group of Māori women asking him to send some wahine tapu (holy women) who could teach their children.15 To celebrate that early call, O’Leary modelled a Māori woman

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Figure 6.4  Gael O’Leary, Aroha, 2000.

with her mokapuna (child/​grandchild). She named her (and the sculpture) Aroha (love). The Mercy Congregation has always been committed to Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi),16 and this partnership with the tangata whenua (the indigenous Māori people, the ‘people of the land’) is symbolized in O’Leary’s sculpture by the hand-​like forms that support Aroha and her child. The child is holding the world, signifying the Congregation’s commitment to care for and to nurture the planet, respecting its fragile ecosystem. At the rear of the sculpture are three unfurling fern fronds which are symbols of life, growth and development as well as the ongoing journey we are called to make. The name ‘Aroha’ encompasses all of these qualities and symbolizes that aspect of Mercy that knows no boundary of race or creed. With works such as Aroha and the Mercy Bronze, O’Leary documents chapters in the history of the Sisters of Mercy in Australia and New Zealand.

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Throughout her oeuvre, such Antipodean historical works are interspersed with representations of biblical scenes and themes. And it is to the Bible, specifically the New Testament, that O’Leary turned when approached by the Brisbane Congregation of the Sisters of the Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. The Congregation was building a new chapel and had a vision for an artwork that would be multifaceted, with the principal feature being a three-​metre-​high Risen Christ ‘floating’ in front of a twelve-​metre curved wall.17 The negative space of a cross had been formed into a wall, allowing light from the windows behind to shine through. Once she had modelled the small-​scale maquette for the Risen Christ (2000–​ 2001) O’Leary faced the challenge of developing it into a three-​metre statue. Once again, the artist turned to her local community to find a life model; Sasha Robertson, a thirty-​three-​year-​old teacher, was the inspiration for this contemporary expression of the Christ figure.18 O’Leary explains: Although the figure had a whirl of flying drapery covering his genitals (necessary for the modesty of the nuns) I  wanted to model the figure naked. I always do this for my free standing ­figures –​it makes the dressing of them much more accurate and believable. In order to get the musculature correct, especially in the hanging position, I had Sasha strip off and hang from some scaffolding for several minutes at a time. It was not the most pain-​free experience for him, but he persevered.

After completing her MFA in 1995, O’Leary focused on sculpture in her art practice. In the year 2000, however, her painting Meetings (1989) (Figure 6.5) was included in an exhibition at the Provincial Museum of Alberta, Canada. The curator had seen the painting in a 1991 publication, The Bible through Asian Eyes, which had Old and New Testament interpretations in painting and sculpture by Asian and Pacific artists.19 A number of her other paintings have also appeared in international publications, including Joyce Huggett’s book Funding God in the Fast Lane and Wendy Miller’s prayer guide, Spiritual Friendship.20 In 2001, O’Leary undertook her second commission for a free-​standing bronze figurative sculpture, a representation of Agnes of Rome. According to tradition, Saint Agnes was one of the virgin martyrs who, in the third century CE, was imprisoned, stripped of her clothes and put on trial for her Christian

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Figure 6.5  Gael O’Leary, Meetings, 1989.

beliefs. However, traditional images show Agnes clothed head to toe in a long white robe, often holding a flower and accompanied by a lamb. For the Church of St Agnes in Highett, Melbourne, O’Leary wanted to create a more contemporary image, one that showed the saint’s vulnerability as well as her much lauded modesty. She wanted to capture the beauty, dignity and steadfastness of this young woman who courageously embraced death rather than deny her beliefs. O’Leary’s Agnes is semi-​naked and vulnerable, a Christ-​like figure who can still be heroicized by young women in the twenty-​first century. Once again, employing a life-​model was imperative to capturing a believable image; for this work a thirteen-​year-​old girl from the Highett community modelled for Agnes.21 In O’Leary’s composition, particular attention is afforded the hands, which are a key element in communicating both the modesty and the vulnerability of the figure. Agnes’s delicately modelled hands clutch at a wisp of drapery in an attempt, only partially successful, to cover her naked body. Parallel to Agnes, O’Leary was also developing a concept for a sculpture representing faith; this was the theme of a work proposed for St Peter’s Primary School, Bendigo North, Victoria. Faith (2001) is a high relief panel based on the text of Lk. 5.1–​11, where Jesus tells Peter the fisherman to cast his net out

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into the deep to fish, even though Peter and his brothers had fished all night without success. Peter does so, and, to his amazement, catches an abundance of fish. Jesus then invites Peter to follow him and become a ‘fisher of men’. O’Leary wanted this sculpture to be an interactive piece that the children at St Peter’s could readily relate to. She replaced the disciples with students from the school, so that the calling of Peter to follow Jesus also became their call, and the faith of Peter, their inspiration. Similarly positioned with regard to its audience and its reflection of the contemporary life of the Church is the sculptor’s Mercy Cross.22 Religious life had begun to change after the Second Vatican Council in 1962; O’Leary’s concept of a modern Mercy Cross reflects these changes. Taking the traditional Mercy Cross as the basic shape, she developed an open spatial form in the centre of the cross, a symbol signifying receptiveness to the world and its needs, inviting the wider community in. Designed initially as Heart of Mercy (2003) for the Mercy Congregational Centre in Auckland, this format has been adapted and used widely throughout New Zealand and Australia in various media. The New Zealand cross is situated between two abstracted koru, while the leaf, nuts and flower of the Australian gum tree are likewise incorporated. In 2012, for the newly formed Institute of the Sisters of Mercy of Australia and Papua New Guinea, O’Leary added the bird of paradise motif, symbolic of Papua New Guinea. By the turn of the century, O’Leary had been working as a professional sculptor for more than twenty years, and her work was attracting attention beyond the shores of Australia and New Zealand. In 2004, O’Leary was commissioned to create Mentor (Figure 6.6) for Baltimore’s Mercy High School. O’Leary explains the creative process and inspiration behind this work: ‘As so often happens when I am about to create a new work, I awoke in the middle of the night. I heard the words “I walk with them” and I knew that Catherine McAuley had spoken these words to me.’ Mentor, an image of empathy and interaction, was born. O’Leary regards Catherine McAuley, founder of the Sisters of Mercy Order, as a woman whose values are as relevant now as they were in nineteenth-​century Ireland. As she explains, ‘She walks with us now and into the future as a model of faith, compassion and inspiration.’ In this work, McAuley’s image walks forever by the side of a Mercy student, as the youngster’s mentor and friend. The student in Mentor is wearing the school

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Figure 6.6  Gael O’Leary, Mentor, 2004.

uniform of Baltimore Mercy High School. Thus, Mentor makes a special connection with its specific audience, akin to that of Sophie (2008), the familiar figure whom students at Baradene College, Auckland, welcomed into their midst in 2009. This 2.7-​metre bronze statue is an image of the school’s founder, Saint Madeleine Sophie Barat –​and would be the final commission O’Leary received as a Sister of Mercy.23 The year 2008 proved to be a watershed year in O’Leary’s life. To celebrate her sixtieth birthday, she organized a retrospective exhibition of her sculpture. The exhibition’s title, Inscape, harks back to her early empathy with the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. It showcased much of O’Leary’s most recent sculpture, which featured images of figures bracing themselves in some way against the wind, a powerful symbol of the life forces that can beset us. Although O’Leary did not realize it at the time, these works were intensely personal, reflecting her ongoing battle to assert herself as an artist within her Congregation.

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At this stage, O’Leary was at a crossroads once more. Over the years, she had become increasingly disillusioned with the Church and had begun to wonder about her place in it, indeed about her place in religious life. In earlier times she had thought that, through her art, she could contribute to growth within the Church by challenging the authorities and the wider community, particularly on social justice issues. But O’Leary recognized that, while a few token modifications had been made, the place of women in the Church was basically the same as it was decades ago. She regarded the Catholic Church as ‘operating a patriarchal, discriminatory system which is run by men in skirts who preach equality before God’. One aspect of religious life that O’Leary had always struggled with was the knowledge that her life decisions were not her own to make, and that she could be called back to New Zealand to live in a ‘regular Community’ at any time. In 2008, she decided it was time to try a different road, not abandoning her core beliefs but no longer living within the constraints of religious life. O’Leary had been a nun for over forty years, but she now felt that to stay would compromise her integrity. She took another leap of faith: it was time to leave the Order. It was in fact a terrifying decision. In order to establish a ‘secular self ’, and to continue her art practice, O’Leary was faced with a range of challenges, not the least of which was the need to obtain a mortgage when she was sixty-​one years old. Although she had worked steadily since the time she had entered the Convent, it was all in the name of the Order. She had no personal credit history but was faced with taking over the business and the lease of the Mercy Sculpture Centre, which, under the auspices of the Church, she had established and been operating for four years. O’Leary started her new sculpture studio and teaching venture, Bayside Sculpture, with no capital –​but with great faith. Since the outset, the doors at Bayside have been open to everyone. At the Centre’s art classes, everybody –​ whatever the level of experience or expertise  –​is welcome to explore their creativity through a range of three-​dimensional media.24 The first two years post-​Convent were difficult, however, as O’Leary struggled to earn enough to meet the costs of running the Centre. It was a tough time, compounded by a period of depression; feeling that she had hit rock bottom, O’Leary returned to her Prayer of Surrender. Gradually the tide turned. At Bayside, O’Leary had a strong and mutually supportive community that celebrated her creativity and

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rallied around her. Students in her classes assisted and encouraged her with donations and practical support. In 2013, O’Leary began work on a piece titled Come Sit Awhile (2013–​14) (Figure 6.1), a life-​size bronze of Catherine McAuley at Stanmore, the Sydney headquarters of the Institute of the Sisters of Mercy of Australia and Papua New Guinea. In the grounds of the Institute, the figure of Catherine McAuley, in secular clothing, sits on a garden bench. One of her hands rests on an open prayer book in her lap, the other on the park bench –​she is turned as if in conversation with someone beside her. This work invites interaction in the same manner as Sophie at Baradene College in Auckland. Inspiration for Come Sit Awhile came to O’Leary while sitting in the garden of the Institute. In her words: I had a strong sense of Catherine sitting with me [and] while I used a live model on which to base the figure, when it comes to my sculptures of Catherine, I always let the face emerge from the clay. This is part of a meditative process that happens when I am creating a work such as this. Once I blocked in the figure in clay I spent some time on the face –​in some ways it felt as if I was channelling Catherine, a woman of courage, infinite wisdom, and deep faith; a woman who had a kind heart and a listening ear. I  felt that this remarkable woman should be an inspiration and a beacon of hope and comfort to all who come to sit beside her. The prayer book Catherine is holding indicates her communion with God. At the same time, it was important to show that she was a woman who was open to the needs of others. Although I am now on a different path, my Mercy journey imbues who I am and Catherine continues to be an inspirational woman in my life.

Along with Come Sit Awhile, a further work was commissioned for the Institute’s ministry offices in the neighbouring suburb of Lewisham. The brief for this work specified a relief sculpture expressing the values of love and compassion. In the parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk. 10.25–​37), Jesus gave the word ‘neighbour’ a new meaning, expanding the term to include anyone in need; it was to this biblical story that O’Leary turned. Thematically, compositionally and stylistically, the Lewisham Good Samaritan (2013–​14) (Figure  6.7) affiliates with the sculptor’s 2006 wall reliefs of the Visitation (Figure 6.8) and the Return of the Prodigal (Figure 6.9) at Emmaus Residential Care, Banyo, Queensland. In all of these works the emphasis is on line rather

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Figure 6.7  Gael O’Leary, Good Samaritan, 2013–​14.

than the depiction of realistic detail. In the Good Samaritan sculpture, the lines of the Samaritan’s cloak, like the wings of an angel, wrap protectively around the wounded figure. The sculptures for the Institute of the Sisters of Mercy were completed and installed in August 2014, after which O’Leary began her largest bronze relief to date: an 8 x 4.5 m interpretation of the Song of Miriam (Figure 6.10), for the Miriam Theatre, a new performing arts building at Our Lady of Sion College, Box Hill, Melbourne. Both the building and the artwork are named after the figure of Miriam in the book of Exodus, and O’Leary specifically based her sculpture on the scripture passage known as the Song of Miriam: ‘Then the prophet Miriam, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine in her hand; and all the women went out after her with tambourines and with dancing. And Miriam sang to them: “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously, horse and rider he has thrown into the sea!” ’(Exod. 15.20–​21). Miriam is acknowledged

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Figure 6.8  Gael O’Leary, Visitation, 2006.

as a prophetess in the Old Testament and is the ‘leading lady’ in the Exodus story. Such a theme, the role of women in liturgy and society, has long informed the work of O’Leary, and Miriam is shown as an appropriately strong woman in this lyrical composition. While The Song of Miriam was being installed in January 2016, O’Leary was already working on The Traveller, a life-​size bronze sculpture of Sister Ursula Frayne (Figure 6.11). Sitting calmly on a suitcase with her hands resting gently on her breviary, Ursula looks at the viewer –​who may choose to sit on one of the other suitcases –​inviting passers-​by to commune with her. Foundress of the first Community of Sisters of Mercy to arrive in Australia, Ursula Frayne and a small band of sisters arrived in Perth 170 years ago, and O’Leary’s figurative bronze has been commissioned by the Perth Community to celebrate that milestone. The commission also marks 2016 as the Year of Mercy, as proclaimed by Pope Francis. The installation date is 12 December, Foundation

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Figure 6.9  Gael O’Leary, Return of the Prodigal, 2006.

Figure 6.10  Gael O’Leary, concept drawing for The Song of Miriam, 2014.

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Figure 6.11  Gael O’Leary, concept drawing for The Traveller, 2016.

Day for the Sisters of Mercy, the day that Catherine McAuley officially established the Order in Ireland. Ursula Frayne was a woman of faith and courage. She was an intrepid, resourceful traveller who, with a brave band of Sisters, crossed the world to share the Gospel message of mercy, justice and compassion. She was a faithful follower of Catherine McAuley even when this caused conflict with those in authority and made her own life journey more difficult. It is fitting that Ursula is sitting on a steamer trunk, symbolic of the arduous journey that she undertook by sailing ship in 1846. Ursula was a migrant travelling to an unknown place, not knowing if she would ever return to her home country. Her trunk becomes symbolic of her transition into exile and a new beginning in a new country. It is a metaphor for travelling, as well as indicating the few possessions that Ursula and her group of Sisters brought along with them. The suitcases opposite Ursula are symbolic of all our life journeys. Suitcases hold the memories and life stories, personal and shared, of all who travel through life and take time to sit and reflect; wherever we go we take our concerns, beliefs, longings and insecurities, our dreams, our promise and potential. As O’Leary explains, ‘In today’s world, where many desperate people are

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fleeing poverty-​stricken, war-​torn countries to seek a better life in Australia, Ursula is a reminder that migrants, legal or otherwise, are not just statistics but people with a personal story and a wealth of experience and a culture and faith to share.’ O’Leary well knows the courage and the tribulations of the traveller. In 2010, after forty-​two years as a nun, Sister Gael R.S.M. was released from her vows as a Sister of Mercy and once again became known as Gael O’Leary. Although in hindsight, she credits the Catholic Church with providing her entrée into the world of art and art history, as a nun it had never been easy for O’Leary to follow her individual calling to use art as ministry. As well as battling the hierarchical structure and sexism within the Church, O’Leary’s vows of poverty and obedience were ongoing obstacles to the development of her talent and skill as an artist. Ironically, however, it would be a succession of significant commissions from the Church that would ultimately give her the confidence and the impetus that led to her divorce from the Church. Since leaving the Order O’Leary has continued to express her faith through her art: it was the way of life, not faith, that she rejected. Through her work, she continues to advocate for social justice and to demonstrate the relevance of the biblical narrative to contemporary society. Along the way, her body of work has come to document the history of the Order of the Sisters of Mercy in Australia and New Zealand.

Notes 1. The Sisters of Mercy (R.S.M.) are members of a religious institute of Catholic women founded in 1831, at Dublin, Ireland, by Catherine McAuley (1778–​1841). 2. Unless otherwise specified, all opinions and quotations attributed to Gael O’Leary are from conversations with the author between March 2014 and July 2015. 3. Reverend Father Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. (1844–​89) was an English poet, Roman Catholic convert and a Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame established him among the leading Victorian poets. 4. See Michael Dunn, New Zealand Sculpture: A History (Auckland University Press, 2002). 5. See Gordon Brown, Colin McCahon: Artist (Auckland: Reed, 1984). 6. The mural measured approximately 27 square metres.

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7. The Cenacle is a room in Jerusalem traditionally held to be the site of the Last Supper. The Sisters of the Cenacle focus on faith and prayer. Their service takes the form of retreats, spiritual direction and religious education. 8. This exhibition, which included painting and sculpture, was held at Gallery Pacific, Auckland, in 1986. 9. For images and a chronology of O’Leary’s work, see the artist’s website available online: www.baysidesculpture.com.au. 10. The Brigidine Sisters are a global Roman Catholic congregation, founded by Bishop Daniel Delany in Ireland in 1807. 11. O’Leary’s notoriety preceded her –​at one retreat she was informed by a zealous seminarian that he was aware she had been reported to the Pope for an ‘act of heresy’. 12. Mater was founded in 1906 by the Sisters of Mercy. This was the first Mater Private Hospital, and the start of a tradition of care and compassion for the sick and needy in Australia. 13. For more discussion of Clutterbuck and Wilson, see A. (Sasha) Grishin, The Art of Jock Clutterbuck (Melbourne: Macmillan Art Publishing and Australian Galleries Publishing, 2013); Ken Scarlett, Australian Sculptors (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1980). 14. The Congregation gifted the sculpture to the city of Auckland. 15. Bishop Pompallier (1802–​71) was the first Roman Catholic Bishop in New Zealand. Born in Lyon, France, Pompallier arrived in New Zealand in 1838 and was instrumental in organizing the Roman Catholic Church throughout the country. 16. Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi) is a treaty signed on 6 February 1840 by representatives of the British Crown and Māori chiefs from the North Island of New Zealand. The Treaty established a British Governor of New Zealand and gave Māori the same rights afforded to British subjects. 17. As part of this commission, O’Leary also sculpted a free-​standing Holy Family group, and designed the tabernacle and relief panels for the lectern, altar and presiding chair. 18. Sasha Robertson is the son of O’Leary’s colleague, sculptor Anna Robertson, whom she met when working at the Mercy Art and Creativity Centre. 19. Masao Takenaka and Ron O’Grady, The Bible through Asian Eyes (Auckland: Pace Publishing, 1991). 20. Joyce Huggett, Finding God in the Fast Lane (Guildford, Surrey: Eagle, 2000); Wendy Miller, Spiritual Friendship (Guildford, Surrey: Eagle, 1995). 21. Accounts vary, but general consensus is that Agnes of Rome was either twelve or thirteen years of age when she was martyred.

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22. A black ebony cross with a white ivory centre, designed by Mother Catherine McAuley, is the traditional Mercy symbol; historically it was worn on the rosaries of Sisters of Mercy. 23. Sophie is the popular name given to the eponymous work Sophie Madeleine Barat. Saint Madeleine Sophie Barat (1779–​1865), French founder of the Society of the Sacred Heart, dreamed of a congregation of women dedicated to the Sacred Heart. Baradene College is the only remaining New Zealand school affiliated with the Society of the Sacred Heart. The sculpture marks the school’s centennial. 24. Bayside Sculpture is the only establishment of its kind in Melbourne that focuses on sculpture and, although not exclusive, is particularly supportive of women. The Centre now has six resident sculptors in addition to O’Leary; all are former students who are developing successful careers as artists.

Bibliography Burke, D. Dreaming of the Resurrection. Sydney: Mary MacKillop Foundation, 1998. Concannon, A. ‘A Ministry of Communication’. Marist Messenger. November 1987, 42–​4. Goa, D. J., Linda Distad and Mathew Wangler. Anno Domini: Jesus through the Centuries. Canada: Provincial Museum of Alberta, 2000. The Grafton Bronzes. Sydney: Institute of Mercy of Australia and Papua New Guinea, 2013. Published to commemorate the unveiling of Gael O’Leary’s Grafton bronzes at the Mercy Centre, Grafton, New South Wales. Huggett, J. Finding God in the Fast Lane. Guildford: Eagle, 2000. The Mercy Bronze. Brisbane: Mater Misericordiae Private Hospital, 1992. Published to commemorate the unveiling of Gael O’Leary’s Mercy Bronze, Brisbane. Miller, W. Spiritual Friendship. Guildford: Eagle, 1995. Mount Lilydale College Centennial Bronze. Melbourne: Mount Lilydale College, 1996. Published to commemorate the unveiling of Gael O’Leary’s Centennial Bronze, Melbourne. Takenaka, M., and Ron O’Grady. The Bible through Asian Eyes. Auckland: Pace Publishing, 1991.

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Exploring Visual Exegesis A Conversation between Artist and Beholders Caroline Blyth and Alex Farrell, with Tony Brooking

Visual exegesis is a method of biblical interpretation that treats visual images as sources of illumination –​magic lanterns by which we can view biblical texts in new and valuable lights. It invites us to approach artists’ presentations of biblical stories, themes and characters as interpretations or exegetical responses to these stories, themes and characters, rather than as mere illustrations. These presentations are treated as part of an interpretive process that is continually evolving, drawing on renewed significances bestowed upon these texts across space and time. As theologian David Brown explains, ‘Fresh contexts trigger fresh handlings of inherited traditions.’1 In the same way that we might turn to a scholarly commentary to bring additional clarity to our reading of a biblical text, so too, then, can we approach a visual presentation of that text in order to discern how the artist, like the commentator, has interpreted it. How does the art work retell or re-​present the stories, themes and characters within the text? What meaning does it suggest that the text conveys to the reader? What parts of the text are highlighted in the art work, and what parts are altered, or even elided? How does it respond to the text’s ambiguities, gaps and nuances? And what features of the artist’s cultural, geographical and historical context might have shaped their depiction of this text in visual form? All of these questions (and more) form the basis of our inquires in the act of visual exegesis, as we look to the artist and image for new ways of reading the biblical text. As art critic Paolo Berdini explains:

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Painting visualises a reading and not a text . . . [It] does not aim at simply substituting the narrative of the text, at showing what the text tells as a story, but rather at presenting the beholder with an experience that, like reading for the reader, exceeds the narrative aspect of the text and proposes itself as a form of exegesis, a visual exegesis.2

Thus, visual exegesis refers to both the artist’s process of putting a text into image form and the viewer’s encounter with the text made possible through their exploration of this image. As a methodological approach, it recognizes the interpretive roles of both creator and beholder of the image. The artist creates a visual presentation of their reading of the biblical text; the viewer, in turn, ‘reads’ both the text and visual image side by side, allowing each to inform the other. For the remainder of this chapter, we wish to draw together these multiple voices –​biblical text, artist, image and beholder –​in order to show the process and value of visual exegesis within the broader discipline of biblical studies. The main body of the chapter relates a conversation we had with Auckland artist and Anglican priest, the Reverend Tony Brooking, where we talk about his visual presentation of Genesis 1–2 in his painting Te Tīmatanga (The Beginning) (Figure  7.1).3 Within this painting, we are presented with an abundance of visual metaphors, through which we can glimpse Tony’s uniquely contextualized approach to the biblical tradition. Like their literary counterparts, visual metaphors afford the artist a means of expressing the ineffable and unfamiliar in ways that are meaningful within their own cultural and historical milieu.4 They also offer a doorway through which communities of beholders, across space and time, can engage imaginatively with an image, unearthing its relevance, both for the artist and within their own contemporary contextual locale.5 In visual exegesis, this radically contextualized nature of both the artists’ and viewers’ interpretive processes is regarded as key to liberating new meaning from the biblical traditions, expanding their contemporary significance ‘in the direction of the reader’ in thoughtful and provocative ways.6 Thus, in the conversation that follows, you will be able to trace the various processes (imaginative and contextual, pictorial and literary) that interweave throughout the visual exegesis experience. These include Tony’s reading of Genesis 1–2, his articulation of this reading in visual and metaphorical form

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Figure 7.1  Tony Brooking, Te Tīmatanga, 2015.

and our own articulated response  –​as beholders  –​to Te Tīmatanga, as we ‘read’ it alongside this biblical narrative. And, by looking at Te Tīmatanga yourselves (see Figures 7.1–​7.5), you too will become beholders and can join in the conversation as you embark upon your own visual exegesis journey.

Artist, image, beholders: A conversation with Tony Brooking Caroline:  Tony, would you like to begin by telling us about your whanau [family] and your own heritage as an artist? Tony:  I’m from two places  –​I’m from Hokianga on my mother’s side, and on my father’s side I’m from the East Coast of New Zealand, a little place called Te Araroa. On my father’s side, my uncle, Jack Brooking is what we call a tohunga whakairo, a master carver. His children are some of the best tā moko [tattoo]7 artists in New Zealand, if not the world. For me, painting

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is not my preferred medium. I really like working with wood, and I’ve also done a bit of work carving stone and bone. Caroline:  You painted Te Tīmatanga as an assignment for a course I  taught earlier this year.8 I asked everyone to create a visual image that interpreted a biblical text so that they could get a better grasp of the artist’s role in visual exegesis. Was there any reason you chose to portray the Genesis creation accounts for this assignment? Tony:  Last year, I took another course that you taught, Caroline, on the book of Genesis. You showed us a lot of art work based on the Genesis stories, so I started drawing parallels between Māori mythology and the images that I was seeing in class. This current project came about, and I thought it was a great opportunity to use some of those ideas. I wanted to draw parallels between my understandings of my Christian faith on the one hand and my culture on the other –​I needed to see how they might work alongside each other. I spent years trying to find out what it actually meant for me to be Māori. I never spoke Māori when I was growing up. It wasn’t until my kids started coming along that I wanted to make sure that they knew where we are from. So, I  enrolled in a wānanga, which is a school of learning, and began taking classes in te reo Māori [Māori language], as well as Māori martial arts and various Māori practices and protocols. Through this experience, I really gained an appreciation for what it meant to be Māori. Part of this process was learning about yourself and your origins. As my father passed away when I  was five, I  had a twenty-​year disconnect from his family, so I started going back to find out about them. My uncle Jack Brooking was one of my first points of contact. He has looked after me ever since. Alex:  I imagine going through the creative process with this beautiful and vivid painting was very powerful for you. You mention having gone through your life wanting to bring together the two spheres of your Christianity and your Māori heritage. It’s fascinating that you began that process aesthetically, ushering that relationship forward with art. I’m also aware of some parallels between Christian and Māori understandings of the world; can you talk about these a little more? Tony:  Part of finding myself within the Māori school of learning was that it touched on certain components or capacities that make up the whole person –​taha hinengaro (intellectual capacity), taha wairua (spiritual capacity), taha tinana (physical capacity) and taha whānau (the relational component). This is the basis of Mason Durie’s holistic well-​being model, Te Whare Tapa Whā, which explains the significance of these four components using the

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analogy of the four walls of a house.9 At the school of learning, I found myself exercising three of these components quite easily: physical, intellectual and relational. But the spiritual side of things was lacking for me. Looking for this particular component within a Māori context was tricky because you really need an in-​depth knowledge about how to perform the various rituals that relate to spirituality, and that was tough, even dangerous if it was not done correctly. So I thought, ‘Okay, I was brought up Christian (my grandparents were devout Roman Catholics), so let’s give that a go.’ I went back to church and found a peace in myself. So, when I  sat down to paint Te Tīmatanga, I wanted to find the commonalities between my own spirituality and the Genesis 1 narrative, and they just started appearing. This is my personal interpretation –​I’m not saying my ancestors would have interpreted it in the same way, but I have used their icons and symbols in the painting to portray how I see and feel the text, and how I try to look past everything else to see the spiritual component in it. When I think about creation I think about origins, how Māori saw this chaotic event within their narrative and how I can relate that to the chaos in the Genesis creation story. You’ll notice that I have used some creative icons traditionally found within Māori carving and transformed them in order to fit my own interpretation of the text.  Alex:  Do you think there is something about the Māori iconography that lends itself to being able to capture this chaos better than other forms or symbols? Tony:  A lot of Māori iconography comes from nature itself. There are a couple of symbols in this piece that I’ve used, such as the pūngāwerewere, which is a spider’s web [the pink and blue lines that run within the thicker red diagonal lines; see Figure 7.1]. The spider forms a creative web –​it’s a raw form of creation in itself. When I hear the word ‘creation’, I think of it in a very raw form, something that comes from within nature itself. The web is the spider’s house, it’s the way spiders feed themselves; these ideas are all connected to this idea of creation. Caroline:  Can you tell us more about the other symbols that you have put around the pūngāwerewere? I’m curious to see how they fit together here. Tony:  To start us off, these triangle shapes on the outside, pointing upwards and downwards, represent a battle formation called kōkiri ki uta  –​it is a directional figure like an arrowhead. Putting one at the top of the painting and one at the bottom, pointing in the opposite direction to each other, expresses my understanding of the Genesis 1 creation process as being full of movement, back and forth, back and forth. But it also captures a sense of having pūngāwerewere in it. When I read Genesis 1, I see creation taking

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place within a sphere and all the raw materials of creation and all the creative processes are kept together within this fluid back and forth movement. The whole piece has many different patterns of movement in it. Everything is very busy; I wouldn’t generally make my images as busy as I have here, but I thought that creation would have been full on and hectic, so I’ve tried to think along those lines and portray this in the painting. At the same time, I wanted this image of creation to encapsulate the Garden of Eden tradition in Genesis 2, where everything is going on at once too. Caroline:  The idea of battle formations is very evocative. Genesis 1 does hint at this sense of pre-​creation chaos; there is a formless, watery mass that is full of potential [Gen. 1.2], but it’s chaotic and dangerous at the same time. So we can understand creation as the containment, separation and ordering of that chaos. But when I look at Te Tīmatanga, I feel that it wouldn’t take much for things to revert back to chaos –​the ‘busyness’ you mention evokes a feeling of chaos within the chaos –​the chaos of the creative process itself. And when I take that back to Genesis 1, I get a sense of the barely suppressed commotion and turmoil that seems to be unfolding in this otherwise highly structured prose narrative. The priestly authors present these events in an ordered and almost liturgical manner, but the unruliness still peeps through, as it does in your painting. God has to work hard to control the watery mass, ordering it about, putting it in its place, stopping it from wreaking havoc. Your imagery here reinforces that, with a God who is employing military tactics to enclose this chaos –​the raw materials for creation –​in order to better contain it and work dynamically with it. Tony:  That was my understanding too. There is a constant battle going on between God and the chaos he is trying to contain. You can see there is a ‘split’ in the piece [the white horizontal bar] that creates a division between a starting point, where God and pre-​creation chaos co-​exist, and the process of moving forward, into a creative situation. These two symbols here in the middle, rising up from the horizontal bar, are Māori icons for two hammerhead sharks, or mangōpare [Figure 7.2]. They are a symbol of strength and stability. I used them here to represent the tree of knowledge and the tree of life that are smack in the middle of the Garden of Eden [Gen. 2.9]. I see these two trees as ‘holding up’ Eden, so that creation can take place within the space they have made. These swirling circular shapes are called pūhoro, and they symbolize water and fluidity [Figure 7.3]. Pūhoro is a tā moko design traditionally used on warriors’ legs and buttocks to symbolize their speed and fluidity of movement in battle. These particular warriors bearing the

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Figure 7.2  The mangōpare, representing the hammerhead shark, with pūngāwerewere weaving around them.

pūhoro tā moko were selected from their people to represent them in warfare because of their strength, speed and skills as warriors. I associated this idea of strength and fluidity with the water that is such a prominent part of creation in Genesis 1, and I wanted to symbolize this throughout the piece. Caroline:  That is such an effective image. As you say, water is central to the creation event –​the raw material God uses to create the entire cosmos. The fluidity symbolized by the pūhoro speaks to me of the ‘fluid’ nature of this watery mass used to create an overabundance of life-​giving elements –​from the sky and the land to the vegetation and living creatures that inhabit the earth [Gen. 1.6–​27]. And that recurring link to the skilled and swift warrior takes us back to the idea of God’s physical struggle to deal with the chaos of creation. I like the way some of these pūhoro spill over beyond the strong geometric boundaries you have painted in red and white. So, while they do

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form a pattern within the painting, bringing to mind God’s creative ordering of the waters, their refusal to be contained within rigid frameworks reminds me again that there is always room for a wee bit of chaos to continue within this creation narrative –​it never quite goes away. Alex:  When I first saw this piece I thought these pūhoro represented a breath that was speaking into the void. Tony:  Actually, that is what this yellow pūhoro represents, near the base of the painting. I thought it was apt, as a symbol of fluidity, and the colour represents the light, when God says, ‘Let there be light, and there was light’ [Gen. 1.3]. I  wanted to add that into the chaos as a starting point for creation, reminding us of the fluidity of that creative movement. Caroline:  You’ve told me previously that God is the white manaia [Figure 7.3] at the bottom of the painting. It is unusual to have God at the base of the image looking upward. I would normally expect the creator God of Genesis 1 to be ‘on high’, directing his creative actions downward but I think God’s placement here is very effective. In a sense, the deity is speaking out and holding up this structure, which is packed with so much chaotic movement. Tony:  That was my thinking. I had to ask: is there really a top and a bottom? And if so, where should I place God? I decided that God needed to be at the foundation of creation. Caroline:  Could you explain more about the concept of the manaia?

Figure 7.3  The white manaia representing God, surrounded by pūhoro.

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Figure 7.4  The black manaia representing male and female in humanity.

Tony:  Depending on your interpretation, the manaia is often a symbol of a protector, or you can see it in a tiki [carved, abstract figure]; this form can depict a human figure or represent an ancestor. In this case, I’ve used the manaia to represent God and humanity. Gen. 1.27 says that we are made in God’s image, and if you look at the black manaia near the top of the painting, there are actually two manaia there facing each other as a representation of male and female [Figure 7.4]. From a Māori perspective, people have a masculine and feminine side; generally the left side of a person is masculine and the right side is feminine. So, I’ve used this manaia to represent male and female because for me, God is both genders, encapsulated in one. Caroline:  The idea of God being both male and female is not always expressed in more traditional Western theology, yet, in Gen. 1.27, God creates humanity in his image –​male and female. So that coheres with your divine manaia here, representing both genders simultaneously  –​male and female being the essence of the divine image. And in the black manaia that represents humanity, there is complete similarity between the two sides of the ­figure –​ it is as though the male and female sides are mirror images of each other. It reminds me of God’s plan in Gen. 2.18 to make a suitable partner for the man; the Hebrew phrase ‘ēzer kenegdō, which literally means ‘a helper in front of/​opposite to him’, always makes me think of a mirror image –​the woman is standing in front of the man, and both partners are reflections of each other. So your use of the manaia to represent the man and woman was very striking and meaningful for me, given its symmetry.

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Caroline Blyth and Alex Farrell, with Tony Brooking

Tony:  That’s interesting because that’s actually how I did it. I drew one side of it and then did a mirror image to get a balance between the two. The female side from a Māori perspective is taha rongo, the peaceful side, and the male side is te taha tū –​it’s the warring side. Both sides should balance each other out, and at times one will be stronger than the other, but it is preferable that the peaceful side dominates. Alex:  Thinking about the two manaia, with God at the base of the image and humanity at the top, how do these figures invite us to interpret everything that lies between them, within the main body of this painting? Tony:  The various figures in the rest of the painting are all symbolic of different types of animals mentioned in the Genesis 1 creation account. If you look closely, you’ll see that I wrote within these figures the various animal names in Māori, so that people could relate to humanity’s ‘dominion’ over the animals [Gen. 1.26]. To give you some examples from the painting: the yellow creature on the viewer’s left is a moko, or lizard, and to the right of the moko these three green figures represent various types of birds. Along these curving blue and pink lines of the pūngāwerewere, I  also wrote the names of different plants, birds, animals and insects. The sea creatures are named within the mangōpare symbol. I selected the moko, or lizard, because it’s the keeper of knowledge. According to tradition, the lizard protects the three baskets of knowledge,10 so I put it in to show the knowledge component here that needs to be protected and nurtured –​a knowledge of the land and a knowledge of the stories of the land. The birds are something that in Māoridom are quite significant. You’ll hear many references to birds within Māori oration. There is also a song that talks about te hau kino o te au, a bad wind that has taken over the forest so there’s no place for the birds to nest. A friend of mine was singing this song recently, and it made me think of the divine breath of life in the Genesis creation narratives giving the birds a home. Also, I used the symbol of the koru [uncurling green fronds to the right of the yellow moko] here to represent a beginning of all this life. And the yellow net beneath the koru is like a fisherman’s net, catching all these things and holding them in creation. Caroline: I found your detailed naming throughout the painting fascinating because in Gen. 2.19, God tells Adam to name the animals. We could understand this as Adam being invited by God to participate in creation; when you give something a name, you are giving it life and a reality. By using the Māori names, are you drawing the Māori world into this biblical creation story?

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Tony:  There is a rich genealogy to the Māori language; if you break particular words down, each piece of the word has a specific genealogy and each word has a specific origin, which I feel adds to the process of creation through language. You could probably trace each word back to how my ancestors would have interacted with a particular animal or other part of nature in order to name it and have a sense of ownership, or dominion, over it. Alex:  I think that is a powerful way to identify a sense of belonging in creation, by speaking about creation in a language that has genealogy and meaning for you. And the Māori language within this painting ensures a continuity between your present situation and your ancestors. It is as though their naming of creation is your naming of creation as well. That makes you a co-​ creator or a participant in creation. Tony: Many of the early Māori Christian movements were grounded by a sense of familiarity with the Old Testament Hebrew people, the Israelites. That connection with genealogy is something that is really important for us, because my understanding is that our genealogy is not just a human genealogy but incorporates the land and everything within it. We speak about land and creation as part of our genealogy, and that comes from many years of being one with the land. But throughout the years, for whatever reasons, we have become disconnected from that. Yet I feel that it is important to take advantage of any opportunity that enables us to maintain the importance of our genealogy, because we believe that our blood runs in the ground too. Within Māori creation stories, there are parallels with the Genesis tradition of God making us from the earth [Gen. 2.7] –​the god Tāne created man from the sands. When Māori encountered Christianity, we picked up the stories very quickly and shared the Israelites’ sense of how important genealogy is, so it was easy for us to adopt Christian spirituality and to connect with the biblical stories. Alex:  It is interesting that you talk about encountering Christianity because the two flags at the top of the painting made me wonder how colonialism fits into all of this. Can you tell us more about the flag on the right –​what it represents and how it fits into your portrayal of the Genesis creation accounts? Tony:  The flag on the right is the Tino Rangatiratanga –​it can be interpreted in many ways, but it has become a symbol of sovereignty and self-​governance for Māori people throughout many years of protest about the Treaty of Waitangi.11 It represents struggle –​the Māori struggle to gain sovereignty and self-​management. But I think also that the British flag is an important flag for us too, which is why I included it here. I’m English, my great grandfather was

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an Englishman, hence my English name ‘Brooking’, so I have a very strong connection to England. But I am aware that although there are two sides to the struggle here for Māori, there is also a balance. There has to be. Those two flags create a conversation, and we can’t let this conversation falter. Our colonial history is part of who we are, and it adds to our creation story here in New Zealand. There’s a struggle going on in the background, but that struggle is also part of the creation of New Zealand as a nation. Alex:  The flags are so prominent in the image; when I first saw them, I wondered why the British flag was there –​was it a negative symbol, a negative aspect to creation? But hearing you talk about it, I can see that it ties in with the whole chaotic struggle that is such a big part of creation. And, as part of this creative struggle, we can identify the potential for something positive to emerge. Tony:  Definitely. It becomes part of that whakapapa, or genealogy. It’s part of us, we can’t deny it’s there, whether we want to talk about it or not. It’s a prominent part of our creative story in New Zealand. So, to me, it provides a contextual understanding of creation here for us in New Zealand, that there are two sides to the story. Alex:  That’s interesting, because the other thing I noticed was this tension in the painting, between what lies above and below the battle formation motif. South of that formation, I see organic creation, but above –​where the flags sit –​I get the sense of a more imperial form of creation, a creation by force. But from what you are saying, that imperial creation is part of the continuity within the Māori narrative. And these flags are bookended by the sun and the moon –​another continuity of natural, organic creation –​the two ‘great lights’ created by God [Gen. 1.14–​19], which rule over all times and seasons. And I noticed the stars too, on the ‘night’ side. Is there any significance to their particular formation here? Tony: Yeah, it’s called ngā purapura whetū formation. Nearly every marae [communal space]12 has a tukutuku [woven reed]13 panel that has this formation illustrated on it. Traditionally, travellers would use ngā purapura whetu to navigate their journeys on the waka [traditional carved Māori canoe]. And the tukutuku panels within the marae tell stories about the area, how the people got to particular places, why they fished in specific areas. I included ngā purapura whetu here to tie in a feeling of direction and navigation within the piece, to help us find our way through both the biblical creation story and my Māori understanding of that story. There’s a pattern or pathway between these two narratives that guide us through our reading.

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Caroline:  If we can return to the manaia sitting in the foreground of the flags, is there any significance to the female side of the manaia being on the same side as the night and the British flag, while the male side is in the daylight, in front of the Tino Rangatiratanga?14 Typically, we associate the female/​ feminine with pacifism and the male/​masculine with war and aggression. But here, the feminine icon sits before a colonial flag. Tony:  I think there is this huge struggle still going on within Māoridom, and that’s why I’ve put Tino Rangatiratanga on the male side, to remind us of that ongoing struggle and conflict. As Ranganui Walker discusses in his book Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou  –​ Struggle without End,15 we’re still fighting inequality, we’re still struggling with the effects of colonialism, and I  wanted to be mindful of that. Whereas, on the colonial side of things, there’s a sense of complacency and ‘settling’, a refusal to accept that there’s a need for continued struggle. So that’s why I put the British flag on the female side; the generations of settlers in New Zealand have literally ‘settled’ –​for them, everything is fine, there’s no need for conflict or complaint. But, for Māori, there’s a sense of, hang on, we still need clarification, there’s still this struggle going on, we still want to experience self-​governance. It’s as though this is no longer an issue within the postcolonial way of thinking. So, I wanted to locate this conversation above the battle formation in the painting, at the tip of this really volatile area, to indicate this struggle. Caroline:  Perhaps an ideal vision would be that the colonial side needs to work towards reconciliation, but not a complacent reconciliation –​more a reaching out and a sincere acknowledgement that if everyone is to live together here in Aotearoa New Zealand, there has to be some difficult conversations and action, rather than just ‘settling’. You also put humanity at the tip of this military formation in your painting. So they are at the apex of Eden and creation, in this volatile space created from chaos. And here, God has chosen to locate his strongest ‘warriors’ –​male and female –​to manage and contain the chaos. But if I can return to a point you made earlier about human ‘dominion’ over the earth, what do you think of the divine command in Gen. 1.28, where God tells humanity to ‘be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it’? For many people reading this text with an ear attuned to ecological concerns, this verse is very problematic, as humanity has subdued the earth almost to the point of death. I’m aware that Māori connections to land are so powerful. Is that something you wanted to convey in this image? With the manaia sitting at

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the top of creation, could this indicate stewardship, with humanity adopting a protective role there? Tony:  Yes, I tried to situate the manaia both on top of and within creation –​ to encapsulate that sense of responsibility. Humanity is at the pinnacle of the action, so we are responsible for ensuring that we look after everything underneath. Up to now, we have not done a very good job. But, by placing humanity at the tip of the battle formation, I’m emphasizing that we need to be at the forefront of creation, and that we remain in the ‘firing line’. We’re the ones going before creation in that most conflict-​prone location, where the strongest warriors need to be. We need to engage in battle first, and be the last ones standing. It’s part of our responsibility as ‘stewards’ to fight on the front line, maintaining the rest of creation. Because if something happens to us –​the strongest warriors, the most capable of fighting and protecting –​then the rest of creation will fall apart. You’ll also notice that I put the human manaia on the outside of the garden. It was a way of reminding us that we’ve been booted out, because we played up. God has said, ‘Well, you’re out of the garden, but you still have a responsibility to look after it.’ Caroline:  Yes, I noticed that the manaia is near the garden, not quite ‘inside’, but rather with a toe dipped in. When you mention the military formation, that makes me think about the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden [Gen. 3.22–​4] in a completely different light –​their new location is at the tip, on the battlefront. They cannot remain in Eden, but they must still offer the rest of creation protection as part of their stewardship responsibilities. Tony:  This battle context for humanity in the painting also points to the relational challenges between male and female, because very often, there is also a sense of battle going on there too. Caroline:  When I read Genesis 3, I sense that relationships between Adam and Eve are strained to breaking point after Adam blames Eve for his eating the forbidden fruit [Gen. 3.12]. So, as you say, they are in a high conflict zone. But your painting has made me think that this is also a zone of real strength. And given both male and female are at this tip together, standing side by side as mighty warriors, maybe there’s potential for them to resolve that gender conflict and keep working together. While there is a barrier now between humanity and the rest of creation, that protective role has to carry on, even if it is no longer as easy as it would have once been. Tony:  Yes, and there is a sense of disconnect in today’s society between the people and the land. We are not really ‘in’ it anymore, but stand outside it,

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governing over it. Whereas, I think if we could regain a strong understanding of the land, we could probably go back into it, and work with creation rather than against it. Alex:  Thinking back to these two mangōpare symbols in your painting –​the tree of knowledge and the tree of life –​these seem so intrinsic to the structure of Eden, holding it up, supporting the rest of creation. In your painting, the trees are still there, still thriving in Eden, but humanity can’t reach them. We know so little about these trees and their significance in Genesis 2–​3. Do you have any thoughts about what they might represent? And why the tree of knowledge was forbidden to humans? Tony:  The tree of knowledge is such a prominent part of the Genesis story. The significance behind both trees is huge –​mātauranga, or knowledge, and life are both vital. In Māori, we talk about the mauri [life principle or essence] of a person, and that’s how I see these trees. I used the symbol of mangōpare, and put them smack in the middle of the image because they are paramount in the story, as is God, as is humanity. So they are very strong figures within the story, holding everything else up. Knowledge and life are a central focus of that story, and a central focus in Māoridom’s story too –​they hold creation up, keep creation moving forward. Alex:  And the way you have painted them, it’s as though they are one tree, not two. Gen. 2.9 mentions two trees, both in the middle of the garden. But because you have painted these trees as joined, or as one tree, it reminds me that, as you explained, knowledge and life are bound up together within this biblical tradition. Tony:  I joined the trees because I saw them as the backbone of the story. Also, in the image, I wanted to represent the whare [house]. The trees are the poutokomanawa, or central pole, in the house, which holds the whole house up –​ it is the heart of the house. You will see this poutokomanawa in a number of marae structures, and sitting at the top of the central pole is the prominent ancestor of the house. I placed humanity here, at the top of the pole to represent the idea, in this Genesis creation story, that we are the ancestors of the house, of creation, standing at the top of the trees of life and knowledge.Underneath the poutokomanawa, the mauri stone of the house is usually buried. This stone is the life and essence of the house, and in this image, the mauri stone is God. So God, life, knowledge and humanity are all situated in a vertical line that cuts through creation and drives creation forward. Caroline:  There is something deeply intimate about this image –​it is your own personal understanding of the Genesis creation accounts. But by sharing it,

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Figure 7.5  Artist Tony Brooking with his painting Te Timatanga.

and sharing your thoughts about it today, you are also sharing your interpretation with others and inviting us to bring our own interpretations into dialogue with yours. Personally, I find this an inspiring image –​it crackles with energy and brings what is a very familiar story for me to a completely new place, giving it a lot of fresh meaning. And I’m sure others who look at it would likewise draw their own meaning and understanding from it. Tony:  Actually, when I was painting it Caroline, I had you in the back of my mind, because I was always going to give it to you and I thought, I have an English background, and I know you do, so I was thinking about that. And yes, it is a busy image, but I felt it needed to be busy. My wife is my most valuable critic, and she said, ‘It’s too busy.’ But I said, no, it’s creation, it’s got to be busy. Then she told me, ‘It’s too busy, it’s making me go all over the place.’ And I said, that’s exactly what I’m after –​to challenge the viewer’s eyes visually, to challenge them emotionally, to challenge them culturally. That’s what I wanted this painting to do.

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Alex:  That’s fantastic. Caroline:  It is, and thank you very, very much from us both for giving us your time today. Tony:  I appreciate it, I’m overwhelmed actually, so thank you.

Notes 1. David Brown, Tradition and Imagination: Revelation and Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 57. 2. Paolo Berdini, ‘Jacopo Bassano: A Case for Painting as Visual Exegesis,’ in Interpreting Christian Art: Reflections on Christian Art, ed. Heidi J. Hornik and Mikeal C. Parsons (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2004), 170–​1. 3. This conversation between the authors and Tony Brooking took place on 7 July 2015. Immense thanks to Tony for taking time out of his hectic schedule (as parish priest and Theology student) to talk to us. Thanks also to Tim Page, digital media support specialist at the University of Auckland, who operated the recording of the interview and took the photos of Te Tīmatanga used as illustrations throughout the chapter. The interview transcript was edited to remove personal information and material irrelevant to the main discussion. Clarifying details, biblical references and translations are in square brackets. 4. Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), 18. 5. Ibid., 22–​3. 6. Berdini, ‘Jacopo Bassano’, 180. 7. ‘Tā moko’ is the Māori term for traditional Māori tattooing, or skin art (kirituhi). A moko tells a story about the wearer’s ancestry, tribal affiliations, knowledge and social status. See Rawinia Higgins, ‘Tā moko –​ Māori Tattooing –​Origins of tā moko’, in Te Ara –​ the Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, available online: http://​www.teara.govt.nz/​en/​ ta-​moko-​maori-​tattooing. 8. The course was called ‘Danger and Desire: The Bible in Visual Culture’, which introduced students to the art of visual exegesis within biblical studies. 9. See Mason Durie, Mauri Ora: The Dynamics of Māori Health (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Te Whare Tapa Whā is a Māori holistic health model utilized in New Zealand by multiple health providers for people of all cultures. 10. Māori tradition identifies three baskets of knowledge (kete o te wānanga) given to humanity by the god Tāne: te kete tuatea (basket of ancestral knowledge), te kete tuauri (basket of sacred knowledge) and te kete aronui (basket of pursuit).

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11. Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi) was signed on 6 February 1840 by representatives of the British Crown and over 500 Māori chiefs. It established a British Governor of New Zealand and rendered New Zealand a colony of Britain, with Māori officially recognized as British subjects. The precise understandings and expectations of the Treaty, however, remain a source of contention in Aotearoa, even today. See ‘Treaty of Waitangi’, New Zealand History: Nga korero a ipurangi o Aotearoa, available online: http://​www. nzhistory.net.nz/​politics/​treaty-​of-​waitangi. 12. The marae is a complex of buildings and grounds, including a carved meeting house (wharenui), open courtyard (marae ātea) and dining area (whare kai). As an essential institution within Māori culture, the marae is the place where Māori language, oration, values and social rituals are practiced at various meetings and assemblies. 13. Tukutuku panels are Māori art forms, woven reed panels that can depict a range of traditional latticework patterns. Each pattern conveys a particular significance, theme or story. See Kahutoi Te Kanawa, ‘Māori Weaving and tukutuku –​te raranga me te whatu –​Revival of Māori Fibre Work’, Te Ara –​ the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, available online: http://​www.TeAra.govt.nz/​ en/​maori-​weaving-​and-​tukutuku-​te-​raranga-​me-​te-​whatu/​page-​5. 14. As Tony mentioned earlier, the right side of a person is typically regarded as female, while the left is male. In this image, the female is on the viewer’s left, but, as Tony explained after the interview, from the perspective of the manaia in the painting (as though it were a figure facing us), its female side is on its right and the male side on its left. 15. Ranganui Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou –​Struggle without End (Auckland: Penguin, 1990).

Bibliography Berdini, Paolo. ‘Jacopo Bassano: A Case for Painting as Visual Exegesis’. In Interpreting Christian Art: Reflections on Christian Art, edited by Heidi J. Hornik and Mikeal C. Parsons, 169–​86. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2004. Brown, David. ‘The Trinity in Art’. In The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Trinity, edited by Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall and Gerald O’Collins, 329–​ 56. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Brown, David. Tradition and Interpretation: Revelation and Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

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Durie, Mason. Mauri Ora: The Dynamics of Māori Health. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Higgins, Rawinia. ‘Tā moko –​ Māori tattooing –​Origins of tā moko’. In Te Ara –​ the Encyclopedia of New Zealand. Available online: http://​www.teara.govt.nz/​en/​ ta-​moko-​maori-​tattooing. McFague, Sallie. Metaphorical Theology: Models for God in Religious Language. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982. New Zealand History: Nga korero a ipurangi o Aotearoa. ‘Treaty of Waitangi’. Available online: http://​www.nzhistory.net.nz/​politics/​treaty-​of-​waitangi. Te Kanawa, Kahutoi. ‘Māori Weaving and tukutuku –​ te raranga me te what –​ Revival of Māori Fibre Work’. In Te Ara –​ the Encyclopedia of New Zealand. Available online: http://​www.TeAra.govt.nz/​en/​maori-​weaving-​and-​tukutuku-​te-​raranga-​ me-​te-​whatu/​page-​5. Walker, Ranganui. Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou –​Struggle without End. Auckland: Penguin, 1990.

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Michael Riley’s Bible and the Touch of the Text (With Reference to the Gospel of Luke) Anne Elvey

Australian Indigenous photographer and filmmaker Michael Riley, a Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi man, died at the height of his artistic career in 2004 at the age of forty-​four. Among many things, Riley explored the colonial impact of Christianity with reference to the Bible as a material artefact of colonization. Colonial contact in Australia is a complex, often violent ‘touch’, where colonial violence and ecological destruction intersect. Riley’s series Sacrifice (1992) draws on Christian imagery to comment on the cultural impact of Christianity on Indigenous peoples in Australia, but without explicit reference to the Bible. The Bible appears in his flyblown (1998) and cloud (2000/​2005) series expressly in relation to the land and ecological impacts of colonization. With reference to Riley’s images of the Bible, this chapter explores the theme of touch in the Gospel of Luke in conversation with the ongoing event of colonial contact in Australia. I  argue that a pattern of compassionate touch can be read in the Gospel of Luke unsettling patterns of violent relatedness. But in the dual context of colonization and ecological destruction in Australia, the materiality of the text intersects with my interpretation in multiple and complex ways, such that my potentially counter-​colonial reading of the text is not free from the impacts (for good or ill) of the text as a material artefact of colonization. Riley’s imagery suggests that the tragic ambiguity of the Bible as a cultural artefact of the colonizers may open to hope through kinds of Indigenous resistance to, and enculturations of, the Bible.1

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The materiality of the text and the materiality of the body As many of his contemporaries and reviewers comment, Riley  –​like many Australian Indigenous people –​died too young. Djon Mundine and Bronwyn Watson cite childhood poverty as implicated in his renal disease and, ultimately, his renal failure.2 Such poverty, while not unique to Indigenous Australians, is more prevalent in Indigenous populations. Colonization and its cultural accompaniments (including the Bible) cannot be separated from such material impacts on bodies, especially where culture, land and health are so closely entwined. In this section, I detour some centuries and continents, to introduce the intersecting materialities of biblical texts and bodies, where bodies and texts touch upon each other, before considering explicitly the question of colonial contact. On one page of a thirteenth-​century Parisian Bible Moralisée, an infant nestles in a partly open Bible. The scene recalls the presentation in Luke’s gospel, when Jesus’ parents bring the infant Jesus to be presented before God in the Jerusalem Temple and there encounter the aged Simeon (Lk. 2.22–​35, esp. vv.22–​4). In the Bible Moralisée image, a woman appears with the child and two men are present. The men stand together. The gaze of one rests on the woman, the gaze of the other is directed toward the child. Ties or clasps secure the book holding the child; the book is close/​d around him. Above, to the left, a child appears swaddled and directly above, another image shows an infant lying in a basket afloat on a river among the rushes. A woman inclines towards this infant at a similar angle to that of the woman below, who bends toward the child nestled in the book. The eyes of the former woman are closed while the latter’s focus on the child. The words to the side of the images suggest that these narratives are about Moses and his sister Miriam (Marie). But the images link Jesus and Moses, suggesting that the book in which the child nestles represents the Torah, the law of Moses, referred to in Luke’s account of the presentation. There is a crossing between basket, manger, cradle and book. A white scroll falls from the draped hand/​arm of Miriam/​Marie and could also hint at the prophet Anna, whom the parents and child also meet in the Temple (Lk. 2.36–​8). The Lukan story unfolds in relation to a woman called Mary/​ Marie/​Miriam. For Luke, Mary is the keeper of all these things: the story, the Torah, the word (2.19, 51). In the moment represented in the Bible Moralisée

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illumination, the Bible (as manger/​basket) is the intermediary between the touch of the sister/​mother and the touch of the elders. Here the materiality of the text touches the materiality of the body.3 Of texts and bodies, Jean-​Luc Nancy writes: Bodies, for good or ill, are touching each other upon this page, or more precisely, the page itself is a touching (of my hand while it writes, and your hands while they hold the book). This touch is infinitely indirect, deferred –​ machines, vehicles, photocopies, eyes, still other hands are all interposed –​ but it continues as a slight, resistant, fine texture, the infinitesimal dust of a contact, everywhere interrupted and pursued.4

As I touch the catalogue from the posthumous exhibition of Riley’s work, leafing through its pages, I am held by his keen eye for the materiality of bodies, their embeddedness in networks of relationships, as if his portraits could touch on both subject and viewer. Riley’s photographs, as Jennifer Deger writes, ‘cannot be abstracted from the context of the lives, relationships and socio-​political histories that infuse the frames’, and his photographs are evidence of his deep engagement in the socio-​politics of contact.5 They give evidence too of what Deger calls a ‘relational aesthetics’.6 Brenda Croft describes Riley’s portraits of women and their children as ‘stunning and incredibly intimate, showing the bond between photographer and subject, as much as that between mother and child’.7 Perhaps it is a stretch, but as I write, I feel a resonance between the quality of the holding of the child in the book of the Bible Moralisée image and those subjects held in Riley’s photographs –​the way that holding touches on the materialities of bodies, texts, illustrations and photographs, and their readers/​viewers.

Contact: The Bible as material artefact and the touch of colonization The medieval Bible Moralisée image references the Lukan presentation narrative (2.22–​35).8 The right-​hand images from top to bottom show the birth of a child, his lying in the cradle/​manger, the discovery of Moses among the rushes and the presentation of the child in the book. There is a crossing between the hands of the midwife, the manger, the reed basket and the book as the place

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that touches and holds the child and keeps him safe. The left-​hand column provides a contrast. From top to bottom are images of children taken from their mothers and slaughtered with the sword; of Moses left on the river due to Pharaoh’s cruelty; of the book closed around the child. The mediaeval images of violence against children are uncanny in their resonance with Indigenous Australian experiences of colonization, of forced removal of children, and of massacres. For many, the Bible has become part of this ongoing story of dispossession, resistance, survival and cultural negotiation. Riley speaks of the ‘sacrifices Aboriginal people made to be Christian’.9 As noted earlier, the term ‘contact’, signifying touch, is used for the colonizing meeting of invader/​settler with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Australian scholars such as Roland Boer, Mark Brett and Deborah Bird Rose have considered aspects of the use and impact of the Bible in a period of contact that continues. For example, the Bible has informed explorer and settler perceptions of their enterprises and relationships to land, has authorized the suppression and destruction of Indigenous cultural practices and has prompted critique of the violence and dispossession accompanying colonization.10 Jeremy Beckett argues that once colonization has occurred, material artefacts such as Bibles become resources for ongoing meaning-​making within Indigenous cultures.11 At the same time, traditional material symbols, such as message sticks and coolamons,12 become part of Indigenous inculturations of Christianity. In the wake of colonial dispossession and displacement, one negotiation of meaning for Indigenous Christians is an appeal to two laws, which parallels but differs from traditional Christian appeals to both an old law, represented by the Torah, and a new law, represented by Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ. Diane Austin-​Broos relates a story in which an Aranda elder refers to two laws, Aranda law and God’s/​Bible law, seeing both as resources for survival, but differently in that while biblical religion has taught that Aranda law is not ‘proper’, God’s law is lacking as it ‘doesn’t say anything about country’.13 Warramirri elder David Burramurra also poses the question of the relationship between the God of the Bible and the land. Without the lens of biblical religion, ‘would he [God] look like the natural world?’14 Burramurra describes a sacred Yolngu word that is ‘our word for God’, encompassing ‘ceremonial beliefs and cultural traditions’ and having manifestations like ‘the Bible, Cross,

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flying fox, or cuttlefish’.15 This suggests to me that the Bible, as material artefact, interpretative story and interpreter of story, is assimilated to country, as one among many sources of life. Ian McIntosh describes further some ways in which the Aboriginal community of Elcho Island negotiate meaning and survival in relation to their traditional beliefs and Christianity. He relates a story told by Buthimang, a senior member of the Wangurri clan at Elcho Island, that ‘there were two types of Balanda [non-​Aboriginal people]. One had a gun and the other a book (i.e. the Bible), and only the latter could be trusted’.16 Nevertheless, he notes, ‘[t]‌he local view [is] that there is little respect among Balanda for Yolngu understandings or ways of doing things and yet Aborigines have needed to make substantial changes in their own ways to accommodate Balanda ideas and structures.’17 With regard to the Bible, one aspect of this accommodation has been in relation to language. In many cases, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been introduced to the Bible in English, the language of the colonizer, as part of the process of cultural damage that accompanied colonial education.18 Some attempts were made to translate the Bible into local languages. The translation of the Bible into Aranda has impacted this language, shifting the meaning of some concepts, notably, for example, ‘the moralization of various terms concerned with physical well-​being’.19 In the nineteenth century, with his Aboriginal mentor and friend Birabahn (Johnny Magill), Reverend Lancelot Threlkeld attempted to translate the Bible into the Awabakal language.20 Where Threlkeld could not find words in Awabakal for concepts in the biblical text, he introduced Greek or Hebrew words.21 Among his published research is an incomplete Awabakal-​English lexicon.22 While his project set out to respect the language and culture of the Awabakal, it did little to ensure the survival of the people whose language it celebrated.23 Indigenous writer Oodgeroo Noonuccal situates her writing as a material alternative to the Bible for her people, a translation of an oral Aboriginal voice in writing.24 Anne Brewster relates: The decision to work with the written word was a conscious political decision for Noonuccal. She describes in an interview how old Aboriginal men would express themselves at public meetings through the Bible, and that the sight of this prompted her to write them ‘a book they could call their

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own’ (‘Recording the Cries’ 18). She describes seeing, after the publication of We Are Going, the same old man who used to quote the Bible, reciting her poetry at a meeting, despite the fact that he could ‘neither read nor write; he had got his white friends to read it to him and had memorised it’ (23) . . . Noonuccal concluded her anecdote about the old man and how We Are Going replaced the Bible, with an explanation for the popularity of the book: ‘for the first time the Aboriginals had a voice, a written voice’ (‘Recording the Cries’ 19).25

Writing in response to an issue of the Friends of the Earth magazine Chain Reaction, which focused on the positive role faith traditions could play in response to ecological crisis, Yorta Yorta elder Monica Morgan points out that religions such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism are introduced to Australia.26 They are ‘man-​made’ insofar as they are not of the land.27 She is strongly critical of Christianity: Christianity is especially divisive and dangerous. At its core is the need to control resources –​it promotes wealth, elitism, the benefits of a few at the expense of the many; it is almost like a feudal system. It benefits a few and captures the rest  –​in effect becoming like slaves. Then the bounty of the earth becomes the property of those in charge. The Catholic church has been one of the worst. They have stolen the most from our peoples. They have store houses of sacred objects:  Churingas, sacred stones, human remains and other objects, carefully taken and catalogued, our culture and history taken and archived; it’s like stealing DNA because these objects are the very core of our being. And once they stole our objects, and controlled our symbols, they replaced them with their own –​ the cross, the Bible.28

Of ‘white fellas’’ relationship to the land, she continues: They have brought their religion to this place and just rolled it over the top of what was here before, just like their gardens of plants and lawn are rolled over the top of the real plants. None of the introduced religions have evolved to the point where they understand where they are and what that means.29

Palawa womanist theologian Lee Miena Skye is similarly critical of the failure of white Australians to understand the spiritual being (which she calls ‘spiritualness’) of Indigenous people, especially with regard to their connection to

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country, a ‘spiritualness’ she regards as inherited through genetic memory in spite of colonial dispossession.30 For Skye, this ‘spiritualness’ is counter to a Western and colonialist dualistic framing of spirit in opposition to matter.31 Skye describes the Christianity inculturated by Indigenous women as different from the Christianity of the colonizer, ‘presenting an image of Christ that is One-​ with-​Creation’.32 For Skye, the problem with the Bible is in its destructive misinterpretation by those who brought it to Australia.33 She comments that for the Australian Aboriginal Christian women she interviewed and for herself, ‘the Bible validated their “experience” of Christ; in other words, the Bible was not their “first” introduction to and experience of Christ’.34 Their experience of Christ is embedded in the sacredness of the land and reflects the experience of their own suffering which cannot be separated from the suffering of the land.35

Michael Riley’s Bible Michael Riley’s Sacrifice (1992) series references this suffering with Christian imagery:  a stone cross; a row of fish; another fish set against cracked dried earth; a fish on grass; lilies; a cross on a chain against a bare chest; and the pierced bleeding hands of a dark-​skinned person, evoking both the death of Jesus and the stigmata born by saints such as Francis of Assisi.36 Grains of flour, sugar and coffee allude to the rations of mission life, as well as issues of substance abuse. For Croft, this Christian imagery serves not only to symbolize Indigenous suffering, but to evoke the suffering that the colonial impact of Christianity entails: a ‘loss, experienced not only by the individual but by entire Indigenous communities:  “loss” of culture and land in enforced, and sometimes embraced, “exchange” for Christianity’.37 Riley’s photograph of the fish on parched ground evokes the way this colonial ‘exchange’ is also implicated in ecological destruction. While not featured in the imagery of the Sacrifice series, the Bible appears in Riley’s film Empire (1997) and his later flyblown (1998) and final cloud (2000/​2005) series. Echoing the Sacrifice imagery of the fish on parched ground, in his flyblown series, a Bible lies/​floats open face down on a shallow

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puddle on red-​brown earth. Another image in this series shows a dead galah (rose-​breasted cockatoo) on baked red-​brown earth. In Untitled [bible] from his cloud series, a Bible floats open face down against blue sky and luminous cloud (Figure 8.1). Other images in the series show a crow’s left wing split and open, a cow, a locust with wings open wide as if pinned to a board, a boomerang and a feather, floating or positioned against a similar blue sky with white sometimes luminous cloud. The audio commentary that accompanies Untitled [bible] from the cloud series says: The Church had a seminal impact on Michael Riley’s childhood through the weekly visits of the Aboriginal Inland Mission. Michael’s mother, Dorothy, recalled how Michael loved to attend Sunday School. However, in his later years, Riley referred to his Christian experience as ‘creepy’. The floating Bible appears in other photographic series, often associated with images of the cross set against a brooding sky. In this series of photographs, the Bible, identified by the cross on the cover, floats alone. The book is open. Its pages are invisible behind the cover and the cross is aimed downwards like an arrow, like a weapon.38

Figure 8.1  Michael Riley, Untitled [bible] from the cloud series, 2000. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Copyright © Michael Riley Foundation.

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In Riley’s flyblown and cloud series, the Bible appears as a material artefact parallel to and in contrast with images of sky, earth, colonization, death, drought, rain and spirit. The multiple imagery echoes the multiplicity of the touch of the Bible on people and country.39 Anthony Gardner criticizes Riley’s work in these series as facile and reductive, and contrasts the imagery of crosses, dead animals on dried earth and the image of a cow against the sky with Riley’s earlier activist works.40 For Gardner, Riley’s hints at colonial and ecological devastation in his later work ‘[condense] the complex histories of Aboriginal peoples and their European –​ especially Christian –​colonizers into . . . facile images’.41 In contrast, Michael Desmond describes Riley’s last series as his ‘most powerful’, with the works’ impact being in the ‘hallucinatory narrative they suggest’.42 The implication is that for Desmond, Riley’s ‘philosophy of doing’, evident in his earlier explicitly activist images is not missing from these later works, but their enigmatic (rather than ‘facile’) quality engages the viewer differently.43 For Dan Edwards, the Bible image in flyblown lying face down in water calls forth ‘the ambivalent relationship between Indigenous Australians and the Christian church’ (and hence something of the complexity of this relationship).44 While Edwards sees in the flyblown series ‘an unsettling portrait of the Australian environment and the unsettling presence of Europeans within it’, he describes a shift in the cloud series towards ‘a sense of hope and liberated possibility’.45 The cloud series was Riley’s last before he died in 2004. It revisits the themes of his earlier series Sacrifice but with a different tone. As Gardner notes in his critique of Riley’s later work, several of the images in the cloud series have become iconic and some are on permanent display in the Musée de Quai Branly.46 But their ‘popular’ status does not render them trite. The feather image has a deep cultural resonance for Djon Mundine who writes, ‘A wing of the eagle hawk, Malyan, a skin name, a scary dream-​being overhead. Is it guardian angel or assassin? In the south-​east, a feather left behind is often evidence of such a spiritual visit.’47 Mundine sees Riley’s photographs less as ‘a simple documentary examination from outside’ than as ‘a spiritual vision of landscape from within’.48 Astutely, Jonathan Jones points out the political force of the cloud series, where country is ‘politically present in its absence from the frame’.49 Francisco Fisher explains that this series merges the private and public in the sacred, as Riley photographed clouds and arranged

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transparencies from his hospital bed amid the business of nurses, monitors and tubes.50 A testament to his resilience, in this particular intersection of the materialities of body and image/​text, the viewer might imagine the frame of Riley’s photographs as his hospital window, a window opening to a complex world of Indigenous being-​in-​place which is not limited to living in remote communities. As Skye points out, white Australia routinely and effectively denies Indigenous being-​in-​place; this denial is a violent touch on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander bodies and communities.51 Because of the relationship between people and country, this denial also touches violently on the land.52 The Bible as a material artefact of colonization, as Riley and others have shown, is implicated ambiguously in this contact.

Contact: Bodies and communities, writing and land That this impact of the Bible as a material artefact of the colonizer can fall under the term ‘contact’ occurs because the term itself is in debt to the more general sense of contact as the touch of one person or thing on another. In this section, I  explore the notion of touch with particular reference to representations of touch in the Gospel of Luke (a gospel, which in being translated into Awabakal is a particular part of a history of colonial contact). Touch is the primary sense insofar as all the senses depend on it (Aristotle, De an. III.13) and are forms of contact, of being touched by, and touching, another.53 Such contact is inescapable: the contact of my feet with my socks; of my eyes with photons of light, indeterminate as they may be; of air on skin, molecules surging into nostrils; of sound waves pressing against the drum of an ear; the always being-​in-​contact of matter with other matter; the touch of one human on another, of one culture on another.54 As a primary agent of touch, the hand (hē cheir) appears several times in Luke. Jesus extends his hand to touch as part of healing (5.13); he takes a child’s hand as part of her resuscitation (8.54); Jesus –​and in Acts, the disciples –​lay on hands in healing (Lk. 4.40; 13.13; Acts 6.6; 8.17, 19; 9.12, 17; 13.3; 19.6; 28.8). The hands can be instruments of violent touch (Lk. 9.44; 20.19; 21.12; 22.53; 24.7); the hand of the betrayer rests on the table at the Last Supper

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(22.21). As election and blessing, the hand of God is on the infant John the Baptist (1.66). The hand of Jesus can denote his role as eschatological harvester and judge (3.17). Angelic hands may be protective (4.11). The disciples use their hands to pick and prepare grain to eat on a Sabbath day (6.1); in juxtaposition, on another Sabbath, Jesus heals a man’s withered hand (6.6–​11). The dying Jesus commends himself into the hands of God (23.46); the risen Jesus offers his hands and feet to be touched (24.39, 40); he raises his hands in blessing (24.50). For Fisher, Untitled [wing] from the cloud series can be imagined as Riley’s arm bent to the window of his hospital room; the colours of the transparency that the light throws on Riley’s face seem to signal the blessing Fisher finds in this photographic series.55 There becomes for Fisher a sacred mutuality of touch in the work of the ailing artist. In his touching on his friend Jean-​Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida comments on Jesus as the Toucher who is touched.56 For Derrida, ‘the Gospels present the Christic body not only as a body of light and revelation but, in a hardly less essential way, as a body touching as much as touched, as flesh that is touched-​ touching. Between life and death’.57 A middle verb, the Greek hēpsamēn means to touch or take hold of and can refer to touch as ‘a means of conveying a blessing’, but also as bringing harm or injury.58 In Luke, hēpsamēn is used of Jesus touching: a leper (5.13); a bier (7.14); children (18.15); the ear of the high priest’s slave (22.50). There is little sense in any of these cases that the touch is violent, unless it is the violence of transformation (even when transformation is healing or restorative). Other more precise words refer to violent touch: to whip (mastigoō, 18.33); to beat (derō, 22.63); to strike (paiō, 22.64); to discipline or scourge (paideuō, 23.16, 22). These words describe the power the agents of the Roman Empire wield against the body of Jesus. The verb hēpsamēn is also used of people touching Jesus, for example, the crowd (6.19), the woman who washes and anoints his feet (7.39) and the woman with the flow of blood (8.44–​7). In these instances when he is touched, Jesus responds. In response to the desire of the crowds to touch him, Jesus speaks the beatitudes and woes of 6.20–​6. In Luke 8 when a bleeding woman who is probably close to death touches him seeking healing, Jesus feels her touch as an outpouring of power from him (8.46).59 Jesus’ response to the woman’s touch suggests the ambiguity of a touch that is at once mutual

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and unequal. A little earlier in the narrative, the Lukan Jesus is challenged by the unspoken question of why he allowed a woman considered a sinner to touch him. In response, he speaks of a creditor and two debtors, of forgiveness and love (7.40–​7), of his receipt of the woman’s touch as an act of loving hospitality prompted by the divine hospitality of forgiveness (vv.44–​7).60 While underscored with difference, the reciprocity of their touch brings their bodies into being in a particular time and place as ‘absolutely separated and shared’.61 Derrida takes up a phrase from Nancy, se toucher toi, to self-​touch you, to describe the way in which in touching the other, I am already touching myself, but also the way in which I cannot touch myself without touching or being in touch with an other, even if that other is my own skin. ‘To touch’, writes Derrida, ‘so one believes, amounts therefore to letting oneself be touched by what one touches.’62 Moreover, through touching I experience myself as tangible (as a being touched by another). When in Luke 8 a woman touches Jesus, he feels his power expended (8.46). Despite her apparent timidity, the touch initiated by the woman is an act of power that draws forth his power to heal. She consents to the risky intersubjectivity of touch, of self-​touching another. Not only is she touched by her touching him, but the Lukan Jesus is given to himself by the touch of the woman.63 Nancy extends this mutuality of touching/​being touched by the human other. The inescapability of the simplest touch or contact between things and the pervasiveness of the phenomenon of touch arise from and express ‘the being-​toward of one thing toward the other’ that constitutes the sense of the world.64 The interconnectedness expressed in the language of touch refers not only to physical contact –​flesh to flesh, flesh to stone, even stone to soil –​but also to the effects of a writing or a work of art. Being touched, gently, violently or passionately (even tactlessly), by an action, a conversation, a writing or a photograph is a physical touching, felt in the viscera of the human body. Luke makes this connection in the Emmaus story, where the two whom Jesus encounters on the road say to one another, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?’ (24.32). The writings that carry the touch of myriad material artefacts and embodied memories touch the bodies of Jesus and his companions on the road.

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An artwork or a writing becomes part of a pattern of call and response, in which ‘the flesh listens’.65 For Luke, this pattern of response is focused in the divine visitation in Jesus whose words are felt as a ‘burning’ in the heart (24.32), a touch that is transformative, as fire transforms. For Derrida, the heart is the heart of the other, the other heart.66 On the road to Emmaus the two say to one another ‘our heart’, a shared heart, for each the heart of the other. Touching/​being touched by the other is the basis of shared life, that is, community, of which the uniqueness and difference of bodies is the ‘life-​ blood’.67 Riley’s portraits engage lovingly with the uniqueness and difference of Indigenous bodies, with a view to keeping community strong.68 Considering Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers, Rosalyn Diprose distinguishes between the trace of violence in the tactful touch that is necessary for the corporeal sociality of community, and a touch that violates the other in the name of community, for example, through hate speech or laws enacted to excise from the community a particular group identified as alien.69 As Skye argues, this latter touch is destructive of bodies and communities, country and land.70

Patterns of compassionate touch Nancy, writing in relation to the plight of refugees throughout the world, describes compassion as a kind of contact that counters violence: What I am talking about is compassion, but not a compassion as a pity that feels sorry for itself and feeds on itself. Com-​passion is the contagion, the contact of being with one another in this turmoil. Compassion is not altruism, nor is it identification; it is the disturbance of violent relatedness.71

The violent relatedness of colonization, the ongoing violence of contact it occasions and the treatment of more-​than-​human others as expendable adjuncts to our existence form a contemporary context for the question of touch in, and of, Luke and the extent to which the Lukan text can reinforce and disturb such patterns of violent relatedness. I have argued elsewhere that a pattern of compassionate touch can be read across three episodes in the Gospel of Luke as part of a wider theme

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of divine hospitality:  the restoration of the widow’s son outside the town gate of Nain (7.11–​17); the parable of the Good Samaritan (10.25–​37); and the parable of the Prodigal Son (15.11–​31). In each case, there is a moment, which is also a movement, of compassion.72 Luke describes a situation in which someone is an extremity:  a widow whose only son has just died (7.12); a person who has been robbed and beaten and left half-​dead by the roadside, whom passers-​by see but ignore (10.30–​2); a younger son who has squandered his share of the family estate only to return destitute and ashamed (15.11–​19). Each time someone sees: Jesus sees the widow (7.13); a Samaritan sees the half-​dead stranger (10.33); the father sees in the distance his son (15.20). Each is physically moved by compassion (7.13; 10.33; 15.20) toward the other (7.14; 10.34; 15.20). Prompted by an inner touch, the movement is directed towards an outward touch: Jesus touches the bier (7.14); the Samaritan bandages the person’s wounds (10.34); the father falls on the son’s neck and kisses him (15.20). A restoration follows this compassionate contact. In 7.16, the crowd recognizes this movement of compassion as a divine visitation. In the Lukan narrative, the compassion that touches the other, that makes compassionate contact with the other, is predicated on a certain kind of seeing which stands in contrast to other kinds of seeing. In the story world of the parable, the seeing of the Samaritan (10.33) stands in contrast to the seeing of the priest (10.31) and the Levite (10.32). For these latter two, seeing prompts not compassion but neglect of the other. In 7.36–​50 where the Lukan Jesus receives the loving hospitality of the woman’s touch, seeing is also at issue. The seeing of a Pharisee named Simon prompts a misjudgement of the woman and a misinterpretation of her touch (7.39). In the question, ‘Do you see this woman?’ (7.44), Simon is challenged to see as the Lukan Jesus sees and to recognize the visitation of God in the hospitality both of the woman’s touch and of divine forgiveness.73 Elsewhere in Luke, seeing and knowing stand in parallel (19.42); seeing prompts knowing (21.30–​1). What is needful is to know the time of the visitation (of God) (19.44). Not knowing this moment of divine hospitality, not knowing and seeing ‘the things that make for peace’ (19.42), is to be implicated in a pattern of violent relatedness manifest historically in the destruction of Jerusalem (19.43–​4). Jesus’ seeing the city prompts his compassionate grief (19.41).

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In this representation of the gaze, the one seeing is touched or better grasped in the guts by compassion for the other. Such a gaze disrupts the violent relatedness that sees the other within the ambit of the same, appropriating the other to the same or denying the claim of the other: the violent relatedness of a master-​slave imaginary and practice, of the colonizer over the colonized. Within the Lukan narrative, approved characters such as Jesus, the Good Samaritan and the father of the Prodigal Son respond to the claim of the other in a pattern of touch. Through the contact of sight, the person seeing is moved to compassion –​a touch felt in the guts –​and this internal touch prompts the person to touch the other (7.13–​14; 10.33–​4; 15.20; see also 13.12–​13). In each narrative, the protagonist touches (on) death. Jesus touches a bier, a litter bearing a corpse (7.14); the Samaritan touches a person who is ‘half-​ dead’, who might very soon die (10.30, 34); the father embraces a son who has been living dissolutely, working with pigs and eating their food, who has in the father’s words been dead (nekros, 15.24). What is touched is the other’s death. To touch with compassion, and so to touch the death of the other, is marked by an excess in which the self is never solely singular, but in Nancy’s terms ‘singular plural’.74 In this context, to touch compassionately is to be open, to offer oneself in a particular way to the in-​breaking of the other.75 In such touching, I am drawn in the direction of ‘consenting to the body’.76 To so consent is to be open precisely to the otherness of the corporeal and hence also to death.77 Compassion signals an openness to the in-​breaking of the other whereby in touching the other I touch myself, but this touch is an exposure to death –​to finitude –​both the other’s and my own. In touching the death of the other, I touch my own mortality.78 In the frame of (post-​)colonial contact, the touch of the other is inhabited by the other’s death: assimilation, damage to culture, loss of traditional languages, appropriation of country and genocide. Bruce McLean comments on the way Riley’s photographs draw viewers in, calling forth a kind of (compassionate) seeing through their ability to ‘tell . . . horrific stories in a beautiful way’.79 Riley writes himself of the beauty he saw in clouds and their variation.80 For Fisher, the final series cloud, completed in Riley’s last years, displays Riley’s resilience in the face of illness and death, even an element of mischief.81 Viewing Riley’s Untitled [bible] from the series cloud in relation to other images of that series, and in the light of my reading of sight and touch in the Lukan narrative, my

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sense is that Riley’s work is not the passive object of a gaze, whether Indigenous or non-​Indigenous, but is materially active in calling forth a kind of seeing, through its touch on the viewer. While this seeing will have different resonances according to the viewer’s cultural interpretations and experiences of the book (Bible) which Riley has set against the clouds, the image seems to open up possibilities for rethinking the materiality of this text in the context of colonization, as both violent and hopeful, but neither easily one nor the other. It is a work that invites contemplation.

Conclusion: Lukan compassion and colonial Bibles Riley’s image of the Bible from the series cloud, where the Bible’s pages are hidden and the land absent, suggests something of the complexity of a colonial context, where the Bible as a material artefact is both more and less than its writings and their interpretation. The Bible is a potent image that, as David Burramurra and Monica Morgan point out, stands with the Cross as one of two central symbols of Christian culture and belief, which can be understood in parallel and tension with key Indigenous cultural symbols. In Riley’s work, the Bible and Cross stand in parallel in separate images with the cross also inscribed on the book of the Bible itself. The Bible is inscribed with the death by imperial Roman execution that its gospel writings narrate. Moreover, the Bible as material artefact and symbol of Christian culture accrues meaning both by and in excess of certain readings of its writings that situate Christian culture in competition with, and as superior to, other cultures. The pattern of compassionate responsiveness I have read in Luke with an ear to some contemporary theory of touch, especially that of Jean-​Luc Nancy, offers a counter to the violent relatedness of the colonial expansion that brought the narrative of Luke’s gospel to Australia. Such a reading of touch in Luke cannot undo the damage of colonization, nor is it an apologetic for the cultural touch of the material artefact that has become in Riley’s cloud Bible image a book with its pages hidden. Mine is not a true reading of a misinterpreted text, but a possible reading of ourselves as readers of Luke. Luke touches (on) death, through a pattern of compassionate responsiveness and through

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the being-​given of the body of the Lukan Jesus, and in so doing is in touch with the concretion of a world in which certain writings can be interpreted to give meaning to religious and political violence. This particular meaning-​ making in turn shapes a world. Insofar as Luke writes to account for the tragedy of Jesus’ death and the destruction of Jerusalem, his touching (on) death touches on the tragedy of bodies (and concomitantly lands) violated en masse every day. When in Luke Simeon holds the child in his arms (Lk. 2.25–​35), he also holds death, both his own, before which he has hoped for this moment of contact, and the child’s. The living body of the infant will become the dying body of the man, executed by the imperial occupiers. The holding is part of a pattern of holding that passes from the maternal body, through the manger, to Simeon and to a gospel inscribed in a book. The material artefact that holds the story of the child, like the book holding the child Moses in the Bible Moraliseé image, is part of a complex history of biblical production, reproduction and interpretation that touches, and touches on, bodies, communities and lands, where mortality and finitude are proper to their life and being. The violence remains, the potential for further violence remains. But the deconstruction of Christianity Nancy brings to the body and my reconstructive reading of touch in Luke suggest the possibility of rethinking the touch of the writing that is the Gospel of Luke as disturbing the violent relatedness of colonization. This interpretation of the touch of a writing cannot, however, account for the complex touch on the reader and on the Earth community of the material artefact in which the writing presents itself to reading. Riley’s Bible images suggest a wider frame of reference where Bibles as material artefacts are not only part of colonial baggage, exchanged for culture and land, but where the Bible, precisely as a material/​cultural artefact, is enculturated by Indigenous people, not only as a symbol of violence and hope, but as part of evolving Indigenous cultural narratives.

Notes 1. This chapter draws on and revises the opening sections of Anne F. Elvey, ‘Touching (on) Death: On “Being toward” the Other’, in The Matter of the Text: Material Engagements between Luke and the Five Senses, The Bible

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in the Modern World 37 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011), 68–​86. Reused with permission. 2. Djon Mundine, ‘Obituary: Michael Riley’, RealTime 63 (October/​November 2004): 53, available online: http://​realtimearts.net/​article/​issue63/​ 7617; Bronwyn Watson, ‘Beauty Touched by Horror in the Photographs of Aboriginal Artist Michael Riley’, The Australian (3 August 2013), available online: http://​www.theaustralian.com.au/​arts/​review/​horror-​ touched-​by-​beauty-​in-​the-​photographs-​of-​aboriginal-​artist-​michael-​riley/​ story-​fn9n8gph-​1226689528715. See also Brenda L. Croft, ‘Up in the Sky, behind the Clouds’, in Michael Riley: Sights Unseen, ed. Brenda L. Croft (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2006), 30. 3. I am grateful to art historian Dr Claire Renkin for alerting me to this Bible Moralisée page and for her helpful discussion of the images. 4. Jean-​Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 51. 5. Jennifer Deger, ‘Review of Michael Riley: Sights Unseen, ed. Brenda L. Croft (National Gallery of Australia, 2007)’, Oceania 78, no. 2 (July 2008): 239. 6. Ibid., 240. 7. Croft, ‘Up in the Sky’, 28. 8. The symbolism of such mediaeval images was multivalent, drawing on figurative interpretation which linked Miriam and Mary, Moses and Jesus. 9. Michael Riley, quoted in ibid., 40–​1. 10. See Roland Boer, Last Stop before Antarctica: The Bible and Postcolonialism in Australia (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001); Mark G. Brett, Decolonizing God: The Bible in the Tides of Empire (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2008), 7–​31; Deborah Bird Rose, Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2004). 11. Jeremy Beckett, ‘Aboriginal Histories, Aboriginal Myths: An Introduction’, Oceania 65, no. 2 (1994): 99. 12. Message sticks are made of wood inscribed with symbols and were customarily used for delivering messages between different Indigenous groups. Coolamons are containers, generally made from the bark of a tree, used for gathering food and carrying infants. The use of message sticks as part of the Gospel procession during celebrations of the Eucharist and the use of the coolamon as a liturgical symbol during the seasons of Advent and Christmas has been initiated by Aboriginal Catholic Ministry Victoria, in consultation with other Australian Indigenous Catholic communities. 13. Diane J. Austin-​Broos, ‘“Two Laws” Ontologies, Histories: Ways of Being Aranda (Aboriginal People) Today’, Australian Journal of Anthropology 7, no. 1 (1996): 11.

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14. David Burramurra with Ian McIntosh, ‘Motj and the Nature of the Sacred’, Cultural Survival Quarterly 26, no. 2 (Summer 2002), n.p., available online: http://​www.culturalsurvival.org/​ourpublications/​csq/​article/​motj-​and-​ nature-​sacred. See also Rose, Reports, 178. 15. Burramurra and McIntosh, ‘Motj’. 16. Ian McIntosh, ‘Anthropology, Self Determination and Aboriginal Belief in the Christian God’, Oceania 67, no. 4 (1997): 276. 17. Ibid., 286. 18. In 2007, the Kriol Bible was published in Australia. Kriol is an Australian Creole language that developed from contact between European settlers and Indigenous people in northern Australia. Currently, it is spoken by around 30,000 people across this region. The Kriol Bible, along with Bible translations in other Australian Indigenous languages, can be found on the e-​Baibul website, available online: http://​aboriginalbibles.org.au/​index.html. 19. Austin-​Broos, ‘ “Two Laws” ’, 7. See also, Brett, Decolonizing God, 60–​1. Concerning the way in which the call of a dove has been reinterpreted by Yolngu Bible translator Maratja Dhamarrandji, see Fiona Magowan, ‘The Joy of Mourning: Resacralising “the Sacred” in the Music of Yolngu Christianity and an Aboriginal Theology’, Anthropological Forum 9, no. 1 (1999): 32. 20. David Andrew Roberts, ‘ “Language to Save the Innocent”: Reverend L. Threlkeld’s Linguistic Mission’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 94, no. 2 (2008): 107–​25; L. E. Threkeld, The Gospel by St. Luke Translated into the Language of the Awabakal (Sydney: Charles Potter, Government Printer, 1891). See also, Boer, Last Stop, 160, 169–​70. 21. L. E. Threkeld, An Awabakal –​English Lexicon to the Gospel by St. Luke (Sydney: Charles Potter, Government Printer, 1892). 22. Ibid. 23. Roberts, ‘ “Language to Save the Innocent” ’, 120–​1. See also, Boer, Last Stop, 94–​5. 24. Anne Brewster, ‘Oodgeroo: Orator, Poet, Storyteller’, Australian Literary Studies 16, no. 4 (1994): 101. 25. Ibid. 26. Monica Morgan, ‘Colonising Religion’, Chain Reaction Summer (2005/​ 2006): 36–​7. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 37. 29. Ibid. 30. Lee Miena Skye, Kerygmatics of the New Millennium: A Study of Australian Aboriginal Women’s Christology (Delhi: ISPCK, 2007), esp. 1–​24. 31. Ibid., 97.

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32. Ibid., 66. 33. Ibid., 15, 82–​3. 34. Ibid., 69. 35. Properly inculturated into country, Skye argues, biblical story is reshaped by these Indigenous women and becomes part of an ongoing narrative of relationship to country and kin, which can form the basis for an ecological Christology (ibid., 77–​98). 36. For a retrospective of Riley’s work, including the images cited below, see Croft (ed.), Michael Riley. 37. Croft, ‘Up in the Sky’, 41. 38. Transcribed from audio commentary on Michael Riley’s Untitled [bible] from the series cloud, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ‘Michael Riley, Sights Unseen’, available online: www.nga.gov.au/​Exhibition/​RILEY. 39. See Mundine, ‘Obituary’, 53. 40. Anthony Gardner, ‘Michael Riley; Art Gallery of New South Wales’, Artforum International 46, no. 10 (2008): 461. 41. Ibid. 42. Michael Desmond, ‘Michael Riley: Sights Unseen, National Gallery of Australia’ (exhibition review), Art Asia Pacific 52 (March/​April 2007): 103. 43. Ibid., 102–​103. 44. Dan Edwards, ‘Michael Riley: Photographer and Filmmaker –​Part 1: Spirit, Land, Image’, RealTime 76 (December 2006–​January 2007): 20. See also, Nikos Papasterigiadis, ‘The Meek Michael Riley’, in Croft (ed.), Michael Riley, 71. 45. Edwards, ‘Michael Riley’, 20. 46. Gardner, ‘Michael Riley’, 461. 47. Djon Mundine, ‘Wungguli –​Shadow: Photographing the Spirit and Michael Riley’, in Croft (ed.), Michael Riley, 125. 48. Ibid., 130. 49. Jonathan Jones, untitled comment, in Croft (ed.), Michael Riley, 136. 50. Francisco Fisher, untitled comment, in Croft (ed.), Michael Riley, 39. 51. Skye, Kerygmatics, esp. 1–​24. 52. Ibid. 53. Jean-​Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 15, 63. 54. Jean-​Luc Nancy, ‘Corpus’, in The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes et al., Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 203. 55. Fisher, untitled comment, 139. 56. Jacques Derrida, On Touching –​Jean-​Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 100.

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57. Ibid., 99–​100. 58. BAGD, 102–​103. 59. Annette Weissenrieder, ‘The Plague of Uncleanness? The Ancient Illness Construct “Issue of Blood” in Luke 8:43–​48’, in The Social Setting of Jesus and the Gospels, ed. Wolfgang Stegemann, Bruce J. Malina and Gerd Theissen (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), 207–​22. 60. Brendan Byrne, The Hospitality of God: A Reading of Luke’s Gospel (Strathfield, NSW: St Pauls, 2000), 73–​6. 61. Nancy, ‘Corpus’, 204; Nancy, Sense of the World, 60. 62. Jacques Derrida, ‘Le Toucher’, Paragraph 16, no. 2 (1993): 136; Nancy, Corpus, 45. 63. Cf. Jean-​Louis Chrétien, The Call and the Response, trans. Anne A. Davenport (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 85–​6, 120. 64. Nancy, Sense of the World, 15; see also Nancy, ‘Corpus’, 203. 65. Chrétien, Call and the Response, 130. 66. Derrida, On Touching, 283. 67. Rosalyn Diprose, ‘The Hand That Writes Community in Blood’, Cultural Studies Review 9, no. 1 (2003): 39. 68. See Deger, ‘Review’, 239. 69. Diprose, ‘The Hand That Writes’. See also, Derrida, ‘Le Toucher’, 122–​57. 70. Skye, Kerygmatics. 71. Jean-​Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), xiii. 72. Anne F. Elvey, An Ecological Feminist Reading of the Gospel of Luke: A Gestational Paradigm (Lewiston: Mellen, 2005), 237–​42. 73. Barbara E. Reid, ‘“Do You See This Woman?” A Liberative Look at Luke 7.36–​ 50 and Strategies for Reading Other Lukan Stories against the Grain’, in A Feminist Companion to Luke, ed. Amy-​Jill Levine with Marianne Blickenstaff (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 110. 74. Nancy, Being Singular Plural. 75. Derrida, ‘Le Toucher’, 137. 76. Ibid.; Nancy, Corpus, 47. 77. Derrida, ‘Le Toucher’, 139. 78. Cf. John Donne, ‘Meditation XVII Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Moreieris’, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), available online: http://​www. luminarium.org/​sevenlit/​donne/​meditation17.php. 79. Bruce McLean interviewed in Watson, ‘Beauty Touched by Horror’. 80. Michael Riley, ‘I Wanted to Tell Stories’, in Croft (ed.), Michael Riley, 140. 81. Fisher, untitled comment, 139.

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Bibliography Austin-​Broos, Diane J. ‘“Two Laws” Ontologies, Histories: Ways of Being Aranda (Aboriginal People) Today’. Australian Journal of Anthropology 7, no. 1 (1996): 1–​20. Beckett, Jeremy. ‘Aboriginal Histories, Aboriginal Myths: An Introduction’. Oceania 65, no. 2 (1994): 97–​115. Boer, Roland. Last Stop before Antarctica: The Bible and Postcolonialism in Australia. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001. Brett, Mark G. Decolonizing God: The Bible in the Tides of Empire. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2008. Brewster, Anne. ‘Oodgeroo: Orator, Poet, Storyteller’. Australian Literary Studies 16, no. 4 (1994): 92–​104. Burramurra, David, with Ian McIntosh. ‘Motj and the Nature of the Sacred’. Cultural Survival Quarterly 26, no. 2 (Summer 2002): n.p. Available online: http://​www. culturalsurvival.org/​ourpublications/​csq/​article/​motj-​and-​nature-​sacred. Byrne, Brendan. The Hospitality of God: A Reading of Luke’s Gospel. Strathfield, NSW: St Pauls, 2000. Chrétien, Jean-​Louis. The Call and the Response. Translated by Anne A. Davenport. New York: Fordham University Press, 2004. Croft, Brenda L. (ed.). Michael Riley: Sights Unseen. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2006. Croft, Brenda L. ‘Up in the Sky, behind the Clouds’. In Michael Riley: Sights Unseen, edited by Brenda L. Croft, 17–​43. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2006. Deger, Jennifer. ‘Review of Michael Riley: Sights Unseen, ed. Brenda L. Croft (National Gallery of Australia, 2007)’. Oceania 78, no. 2 (July 2008): 238–​40. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Le Toucher’. Paragraph 16, no. 2 (1993): 122–​57. Derrida, Jacques. On Touching –​Jean-​Luc Nancy. Translated by Christine Irizarry. Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Desmond, Michael. ‘Michael Riley: Sights Unseen, National Gallery of Australia’. Art Asia Pacific 52 (March/​April 2007): 102–​103. Diprose, Rosalyn. ‘The Hand That Writes Community in Blood’. Cultural Studies Review 9, no. 1 (2003): 35–​50. Donne, John. ‘Meditation XVII Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Moreieris’. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624). Available online: http://​www.luminarium.org/​ sevenlit/​donne/​meditation17.php. e-​Baibul: Bible Text in Australian Aboriginal Languages. Available online: http://​ aboriginalbibles.org.au/​index.html.

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Edwards, Dan. ‘Michael Riley: Photographer and Filmmaker –​Part 1: Spirit, Land, Image’. RealTime 76 (December 2006–​January 2007): 20. Elvey, Anne F. An Ecological Feminist Reading of the Gospel of Luke: A Gestational Paradigm. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005. Elvey, Anne F. ‘Touching (on) Death: On “Being toward” the Other’. In The Matter of the Text: Material Engagements between Luke and the Five Senses, 68–​86. The Bible in the Modern World 37. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011. Gardner, Anthony. ‘Michael Riley; Art Gallery of New South Wales’. Artforum International 46, no. 10 (2008): 461. Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. Magowan, Fiona. ‘The Joy of Mourning: Resacralising “the Sacred” in the Music of Yolngu Christianity and an Aboriginal Theology’. Anthropological Forum 9, no. 1 (1999): 11–​36. McIntosh, Ian. ‘Anthropology, Self Determination and Aboriginal Belief in the Christian God’. Oceania 67, no. 4 (1997): 273–​88. Morgan, Monica. ‘Colonising Religion’. Chain Reaction (Summer 2005/​2006): 36–​7. Mundine, Djon. ‘Obituary: Michael Riley’. RealTime 63 (October/​November 2004): 53. Available online: http://​realtimearts.net/​article/​issue63/​7617. Mundine, Djon. ‘Wungguli –​Shadow: Photographing the Spirit and Michael Riley’. In Croft (ed.), Michael Riley, 124–​33. Nancy, Jean-​Luc. Being Singular Plural. Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Nancy, Jean-​Luc. Corpus. Translated by Richard A. Rand. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Nancy, Jean-​Luc. ‘Corpus’. In The Birth to Presence. Translated by Brian Holmes et al., 189–​207. Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Nancy, Jean-​Luc. The Sense of the World. Translated by Jeffrey S. Librett. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Papasterigiadis, Nikos. ‘The Meek Michael Riley’. In Croft (ed.), Michael Riley, 66–​73. Reid, Barbara E. ‘“Do You See This Woman?” A Liberative Look at Luke 7.36–​50 and Strategies for Reading Other Lukan Stories against the Grain’. In A Feminist Companion to Luke, edited by Amy-​Jill Levine with Marianne Blickenstaff, 106–​ 20. London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002. Riley, Michael. ‘I Wanted to Tell Stories’. In Croft (ed.), Michael Riley, 140. Roberts, David Andrew. ‘“Language to Save the Innocent”: Reverend L. Threlkeld’s Linguistic Mission’. Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 94, no. 2 (2008): 107–​25.

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Rose, Deborah Bird. Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2004. Skye, Lee Miena. Kerygmatics of the New Millennium: A Study of Australian Aboriginal Women’s Christology. Dehli: ISPCK, 2007. Threkeld, L. E. An Awabakal –​English Lexicon to the Gospel by St. Luke. Sydney: Charles Potter, Government Printer, 1892. Threkeld, L. E. The Gospel by St. Luke Translated into the Language of the Awabakal. Sydney: Charles Potter, Government Printer, 1891. Watson, Bronwyn. ‘Beauty Touched by Horror in the Photographs of Aboriginal Artist Michael Riley’. The Australian (August 3, 2013): n.p. Available online: http://​ www.theaustralian.com.au/​arts/​review/​horror-​touched-​by-​beauty-​in-​the-​ photographs-​of-​aboriginal-​artist-​michael-​riley/​story-​fn9n8gph-​1226689528715. Weissenrieder, Annette. ‘The Plague of Uncleanness? The Ancient Illness Construct “Issue of Blood” in Luke 8:43–​48’. In The Social Setting of Jesus and the Gospels, edited by Wolfgang Stegemann, Bruce J. Malina and Gerd Theissen, 207–​22. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002.

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Tatauing Cain Reading the Sign on Cain from the Ground Jione Havea

[T]‌he Tongan art of tā tatau, tattooing, is performed through the beating and marking of intersecting symmetrical lines. The intersecting symmetrical lines create beautiful kupesi [design, pattern], intricate geometrical designs. Tā tatau is the marking (tā) of symmetry (tatau) with intersecting lines. All Tongans’ artistic creations display symmetry with intersecting time (tā). For instance, the interwoven pandanus strands of the mats, the beautiful geometrical designs (kupesi) of the tapas, and the markings (teuteu) on the carving all display symmetry with intersecting time (tā).1

Tattooing received its name from native Pasifika2 tongues (tatau:  tattoo; tātatau: tattooing), but this practice was performed in the ancient world for a variety of reasons. The remains of a male hunter from the Bronze Age discovered on a mountain between Austria and Italy in October 1991 shows tattoo marks that appear to have been done for therapeutic reasons.3 Tattooed mummies have also been unearthed in Egypt (dated to around 2000 bce), Russia (from around the second century bce) and South America (around the eleventh century ce). Whether these tattoos were for therapeutic, cosmetic, superstitious and/​or religious reasons is difficult to tell. The earlier tattoos were abstract short lines, and the designs became more sophisticated in time with curves and images of gods (e.g. Bes the Egyptian god of revelry) and This chapter is a ‘sign’ for the many talanoa (conversations) with, and the reading and comments by, Nāsili Vaka’uta. The reading shared here is part of the chapter ‘Totems and Tattoos: Genesis 3–​4’ in Pacific hermeneutics \ ataMai Pasifika /​Genesis 1–​15 (forthcoming).

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animals (as in Russian tattoos that use figures of donkey, ram, deer and fish).4 According to Steve Gilbert, ‘Animals are the most frequent subject matter of tattooing in many cultures and are traditionally associated with magic, totems, and the desire of the tattooed person to become identified with the spirit of the animal.’5 Most of the tattooed mummies were women, and there appears to have been a high regard for and an appreciation of the practice of tattooing in the ancient world. There is no evidence, however, of ancient women having taken on their tattoos as resistance in the way that modern women do. As Margot Mifflin notes, ‘Tattoos appeal to contemporary women both as emblems of empowerment in an era of feminist gains and as badges of self-​determination at a time when controversies about abortion rights, date rape, and sexual harassment have made them think hard about who controls their bodies –​and why.’6 Modern artists also perform tattoos as forms of resistance as well as identification. The well-​ known pākehā (white) New Zealand artist Tony Fomison moved to Auckland because it was ‘not bloody English everything’ and in ‘a deliberate attempt to engage with Polynesian people and simultaneously as a rejection of the British colonial “imago” in which the nation had been historically fashioned’.7 Fomison was tattooed with the full body Samoan pe’a by the Samoan tufunga tatau (tattooist) Paulo Sulu’ape in 1979, for which (in addition to relaxing cultural rituals and expectations) Sulu’ape was criticized for ‘devaluing an ancient and important custom’.8 Both Fomison and Sulu’ape were resisting something in their own cultures. With regards to tattooing cultures and practices, the difference between resistance, subversion9 and transgression,10 of course, depends on who is reviewing the matters. Tattooing is obviously not for, or welcomed by, everyone. In the bible, tattooing is prohibited. It is associated with the dead and defilement in the only biblical reference to the practice (in the KJV, RSV, NAB and NIV English translations): ‘Do not cut your flesh for the dead; do not tattoo (lit. write, imprint) a mark on yourselves’ (Lev. 19.28). To ‘write a mark’ on the body is taken to be a reference to tattooing, and this is influenced by the reference to cutting the flesh in the previous clause.11 The lack of explanation for, justification of or debate over its rejection suggests that Lev. 19.28 was an accepted view in the priestly (and biblical?) world. Marking the body must have therefore been

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done in the cultures surrounding the priestly legislators, but it is not clear if this was practiced as a form of art or expression of something else. For the Greeks and Romans, tattooing was a form of branding. As Gilbert explains, ‘Respectable Greeks and Romans did not indulge in decorative tattooing, which they associated with barbarians. The Greeks, however, learned the technique from the Persians, and used it to mark slaves and criminals so they could be identified if they tried to escape.’12 The Romans adopted the practice from the Greeks and used it on their mercenary soldiers (qua subalterns) so that they could be identified if they deserted the army. In these two Western civilizations, tattooing was shameful, as the Latin word for tattoo –​ ‘stigma’ –​suggests. Because it was a stigma, it was loathed and discouraged. Tattooing was also discussed as a form of punishment in the Greek and Roman philosophical circles. As Gilbert notes, ‘Plato thought that individuals guilty of sacrilege should be forcibly tattooed and banished from the Republic.’13 The privileging of the mind over the body, and of reason over experience, cost tattooing its place in the Jewish, Greek and Roman publics. Tattoo designs became entwining, elaborate and colorful in the hands of Celtic and Japanese tattooists. These tattooists marshalled in what might be called, for lack of a more appropriate label, the renaissance of Western and Eastern tattooing, and they also help edge a place for tattooing in the landscape of (especially romantic and realist) art. Tattooing has thus come a long way in the Western world, from being the identifying marks on unworthy bodies to being the impression of realism upon the skin of noble people. Exposure to Pasifika tattooing practices and to native (or tribal) patterns also helped with the rebirth (renewal, revival, renaissance) of tattooing in the Western world. The role that James Cook and other European explorers played in familiarizing the outside world with Pasifika [tā]tatau (tattoo[ing]) has been documented14 and i15 will not revisit that discussion here. Nor will i enter the debate on the place of Pasifika [tā]tatau in the history of tattooing in general, and in the revival of tattooing in the West.16 Rather, i will present general observations about tātatau cultures and practices, about the rich meanings of the word ‘tatau’ in Tongan, and with those insights i shall draw and ‘ink’ a reading of the ‘sign on Cain’ in Genesis 4. This reflection is therefore skewed, like a tattoo line that appears to be slanted when the tattooed body lies down

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but straightens out when that body rises, toward and on the basis of my hermeneutical interests.

Tātatau Most native talanoa (story, telling, conversation) on the Pasifika tātatau cultures and practices eventually come around to matters relating to the tattoo cultures (1) that survived uninterrupted (e.g. in Samoa) during the onslaught of the Christian mission, (2) that have been revived (e.g. in Maohi Nui [better known as Tahiti], Marshall and Aotearoa) following the alighting of the mission and (3) that remain dormant (e.g. in Fiji and Tonga) but not deeply nor silently, on the verge of resurging. The following reflection will unfold and entangle in relation to these three cultural grapples. Because tātatau is a cross-​cultural practice, it is crucial to note at this juncture that it never died out even from the islands that fit into the second and third groups named above. There were sufficient movements in the Pasifika ‘sea of islands’ (Hau’ofa) to keep tātatau cultures alive on the islands where they were condemned. In actuality, tātatau simply went underground and survived the many attempts by Christian missionaries to erase it from the native bodies. One of the Christian arguments against tātatau was that it defiled the ‘temple of God’ (human body). Along this line, the survival of tātatau shows that Pasifika natives were prepared to decide what to do with their temples. This chapter is consequently a voice added to the critique of the thrashing of native Pasifika cultures by European Christian missions, and of the ongoing whitewashing of native practices by (native and non-​native) scholars who privilege foreign methodologies, epistemologies, faces and voices. I use ‘whitewashing’ deliberately, because it situates this reflection upon the waves (of orality) in Pasifika, and it draws attention to the myths of whiteness that cloud the study and discussion of most things native in Pasifika. Exposure of tātatau cultures to the European gaze predated the arrival of the Christian missions, when geographers and explorers took back stories of tatau rituals and drawings of tatau patterns as their ‘souvenirs’. Specimens from the Marshall (to the north) and Maohi Nui (to the south) groups were among the first to be taken seriously over the seas. Later on, Māori tattoos (ta

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moko) followed onto the stages of European exhibitionism. It is not surprising that the tattoo cultures from these groups (named in the second group earlier) staggered for some time and only revived recently, along with interests in postcolonial native bodies and the so-​called tribal arts. The tātatau culture that was not clogged by European exhibitionism or Christian condemnation was the one in Samoa. This seems to be the case because Samoan tatau (for males), more so than the malu (for females), was more practical than religious in the old days. This applies to Pasifika art forms in general, as Caroline Vercoe explained: Pacific art forms differ markedly from the Western fine arts tradition. Western fine art objects are generally made to be displayed in art galleries or museums. They are seldom touched or worn. The majority of art forms produced within the Pacific, however, are made specifically to be functional within particular ceremonies, events, or performances.17

According to Albert Wendt, the tatau functions as clothing over the Samoan male body.18 The tatau is not given because someone is naked, but because the community has discerned that he was ‘ready for life’19 –​meaning that he is ready to serve his community. This function of the tatau is showcased on special cultural ceremonies when tattooed Samoan males customarily remove their shirts and sit wearing their tatau. They are not half-​naked, for they are clothed by their pe’a (the name for the full body tatau), which is the most formal garb that a Samoan could wear to any function. Pe’a is the Samoan name for the flying fox, and one can see the tatau as a flying fox that hangs upside down hugging the body from behind, with its wings coming around the front and its head curling up between the legs (as, or over, the penis and testicles) of the tattooed male body (sogā’imiti), thus providing it clothing. As the pe’a covers the male body so is the person with the tatau expected to cover (protect, provide and perform for) his community.20 The pe’a is meant for an upright body, for part of the pattern is covered when the body lies down. And the pe’a is most meaningful when the body is in movement, serving and/​or dancing for the community. In other words, the male body that deserves the pe’a is one that smells (from sweating) like a flying fox. In this regard, in the Samoan context, there are close connections between the tatau (pe’a), tautua (service) and siva (dance). The tatau is

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clothing meant for a body that performs tautua and siva. Consequently, the gifts of tatau are given through tautua and siva (on cultural gifts and gifting, see Vaka’uta’s chapter). Samoan tatau survived the condemnation of the Christian churches (especially the Congregational church, which arrived from Maohi Nui in 1830, and Methodist church, which arrived from Tonga in 1835). In contemporary Samoa, lay people continue to receive the tatau with the blessing of their church and community, while ministers are suspended by their churches but affirmed by their community if they receive the tatau after ordination. The length of the suspension depends on the role and status of the minister, and it is always welcomed given that tatau bodies need time to heal. Lay people who receive the tatau before entering the ministry may be ordained, if they meet all ecclesial righteousness, with no quarrels from their church. Still lying on their backsides are the tātatau cultures of Tonga and Fiji. It is crucial to draw attention to Fiji here because Samoan myths attribute the origin of tatau to Fiji. It was from Fiji that Samoans learned the art of tatau. Samoan myths refer to female Siamese twins Taemā and Tilafaigā, who learned in Fiji the art and designs that have become native to Samoa. For cross-​cultural reasons, and in honour of tufunga tatau giving multiple-​takes (tā) in order to create significant lines and edges, this point deserves repeating: Samoans remember the native Samoan practice of tatau as something brought from Fiji! There is discrepancy with regard to the origin of the twins: some say that they were Fijian women, others claim that they were Samoans who were expelled from Samoa and ended up in Fiji. There are also variants, as one expects of myths and legends, regarding the relation of Tilafaigā to Nāfanua, the greatest war goddess in Samoa who is credited (by Christians) for foretelling the arrival of Christianity.21 Some claim that Tilafaigā changed her name to Nāfanua, but it is more accepted that Tilafaigā married her uncle Saveasi’uleo, the lord of Pulotu (in the underworld), and one of their children was Nāfanua. Notwithstanding the discrepancies, there is agreement that Taemā and Tilafaigā brought the art and practice of tatau from Fiji to Samoa. The twins swam from Fiji (back) to Samoa with their tatau kit and a song that they sang along the way: ‘tā-​tatau the women and not the men’. When they reached Falealupo (Sava’i Island, Samoa), they saw a huge clam deep down on the sea floor and so they dove for it. Upon surfacing, the words of their song

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changed to ‘tā-​tatau the men and not the women’. This is the reason why men receive the tatau instead of the women (who receive the malu). Interestingly, Fijian myths, in Pasifika fashion, give back the honour by attributing the origin of tātatau (veiqia in Fijian) to Samoa.22 The exchange between the Samoan and Fijian myths is problematic when one assesses these myths as if they are serious attempts to identify the historical origin of tātatau. They, however, are not stern myths of origin, but myths that explain the interrelation between the island groups (one island is responsible for what the other island practices) as well as explain, with tongue in cheek, how a culture (like tātatau) is borrowed from one island and then changed before it reaches the other island. There was and continues to be guarded openness to each other in Pasifika.23 The tātatau culture of Samoa came from Fiji but they put it on the wrong body (as far as the Fijians are concerned, seeing that the veiqia is a pubic tattoo for women in Fiji). And so the hearers of the myths are left to wonder if the Samoans got it wrong, or could they have corrected a Fijian mistake. The Samoans showed that the male body should be clothed (following Wendt’s argument). The context is suggestive here:  the twins dove for a huge clam on the sea floor (the gender and sexual overtones are strong) in the waters of Samoa, and they came up with a new discovery –​‘tātatau [clothe] the men and not the women’. Giving the wrong tatau pattern is an inside joke among tufuga tatau (tattooists). Two examples related to the Māori moko (often on the face) help make my point here. First, a Samoan tattooist once told me that a tattoo put on the face of a well-​known American boxer looks like the pattern that Māori put on their backsides. Intentionally or not, the tattooist (who was not Māori) put the pattern on the wrong part of the body. And second, a tangata whenua (indigenous inhabitant of Aotearoa New Zealand) once explained how young Māori who grow up outside Aotearoa claim their native identity by taking a moko. Some of the time, young male Māori are tattooed with the pattern for females. This may be a mistake in the eyes of a tangata whenua but, in light of the foregoing discussion, not in the eyes of Fijians and Samoans!24 In drawing back from the recollection of European explorers and geographers, this review falls back into Pasifika waters in which native communities spar with each other and shift the lines of myths and of cultures (e.g. tātatau). Ironically, the form of art that wounds and scars the body, and is meant to be

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permanent, turns out to be fluid in the memory of natives and shifty across cultural lines. The marks meant for the female body (Fijian veiqia) ends up on the male body (Samoan tatau). The fluidity of tātatau cultures, and the chance that something went awry in the transmission of the practice, invite reading for something ‘wrong(ed)’ in the marking of, and the mark placed upon, Cain (of which, more below).

Tatau The Samoan tatau may be a form of clothing, but the patterns are deep and homing. The patterns and motifs encompass history, genealogy and cosmology  –​the distant past and the immediate present  –​and they embody the sacred and the physical.25 The tatau patterns and motifs dip the tatau’ed body into the streams that flow between the past and the present, and between the community and its sacred and at once physical settings, and all the way to the cosmological yonder. The tatau does not drown the tatau’ed body or its community in the past (time) or in the physical (place), and it helps to take note of the impact of symmetrical lines in the tatau patterns. As Tevita Ka’ili explains, and i take this opportunity to shift the attention to my home context of Tonga, ‘[t]‌he Tongan art of tā tatau, tattooing, is performed through the beating and marking of intersecting symmetrical lines. The intersecting symmetrical lines create beautiful kupesi, intricate geometrical designs. Tā tatau is the marking (tā) of symmetry (tatau) with intersecting lines.’26 Even when a pattern appeals to an image or a motif that is rounded in real life, the tatau pattern, similar to the ngatu/​tapa patterns (see the chapter by Nāsili Vaka’uta in this book), keeps symmetry with intersecting lines. An example of the intersecting symmetrical lines is the familiar pattern that Tongans call manulua (two birds), which captures the wings of two birds (in flight) crossing (diagonally) at their bodies. In the manulua, the two birds are symmetrical and tatau (‘equal’; the second meaning of tatau discussed later), representing parents who are of the same social and cultural status or rank. In flight, two birds share one body and create symmetry at another level, on the ngatu and the tatau’ed body. The two birds imagined to be in flight

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Figure 9.1  The manulua pattern.

(manulua) land on two forms of clothing –​tatau and ngatu –​and it is in the motion of the clothed body that the manulua take flight. The symmetry is majestic: the manulua pattern dips the clothed body in the intersection of time (tā) and space (vā), and the motioning of the clothed body releases the manulua from the traps of materiality. Out of respect to the tufunga tatau (tattooists), one of whom i am not, i will not attempt to explain the cultural significance of the many native (or tribal) patterns and motifs.27 Besides, such a pursuit is outside of my interest for this chapter. Rather, i will reflect on the function of symmetry in the art of tatau (and this would apply to other native art forms also) on the basis of the rich connotations of the Tongan word ‘tatau’ (a shortened form for “potupotutatau”; see chapter by Vaka’uta in this book) which Ka’ili, in the citation given earlier, used as a translation for the English term ‘symmetry’. The Tongan word ‘tatau’ has many meanings, and the art of tātatau inscribes those meanings on the body. Three meanings are relevant for my purpose in this chapter: to set up for reading the sign on Cain in Genesis 4. First, ‘tatau’ is the Tongan word for ‘likeness’.28 A tatau is not expected to capture everything in the so-​called original. It is a likeness that invites and teases the viewer to connect it to the motif and talanoa to which it appeals, and to others that may come to mind. It is the viewer who sees the manulua as parents of equal rank, or as two birds in flight or in copulation, and not all viewers see the same motif or talanoa. Tatau (tattoo) patterns are free to divert from the motif or meaning that they are meant to convey. In these regards, for instance, it is not a problem if the likeness (tatau) requested in Gen. 1.26

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turned out to be different from the co-​creators. In the world of tatau (likeness), that is expected. In terms of the hermeneutical drive of this chapter, i invite readers to consider how characters and events may be tatau (likeness) of other characters and events. In other words, for what was the sign on Cain a tatau? Second, tatau is the Tongan word for ‘equal’ (as in the = equation, but not in the sense of ‘sameness’). A tatau (tattoo) brings bodies from different social locations and statuses to an equal (=) standing. They, at a later time, will return to their usual locations, but at ceremonial sites the tatau equates them. In this regard, the ‘male and female’ bodies created in Gen. 1.27 are tatau (equal) in so far as they are the likenesses of their creator(s). One body is not ‘more like-​ able’ than the other. Rather, they both are tatau (equal), even though they do not bear the same features. Returning to my hermeneutical drive, with whom and how was Cain made a tatau (equal)? What else functions as tatau for Cain? Did Cain receive fair treatment in relation to his tatau? Third, tatau is the Tongan word for the ‘wringing out’ of wet clothes and of scraped foodstuff (such as coconut, tapioca and taro). In both cases, tatau is both necessary and helpful. The aim is to squeeze water out so that the clothes would dry quicker, and in order to separate the huhu’a (juice) from the penu (remains) so that meals could be prepared (see Mic. 6.15). Ironically, when this meaning is applied to the human body, tatau becomes very depressing and oppressive, similar to what we read in Ps. 139.5: ‘You have squeezed me from behind and before, and pressed your hand against me’ (cf. Lev. 1.15; 5.8). Looking back at Genesis 4, how was Cain squeezed and wringed? In order to clothe whom? In order to feed whom? Those are the lines of questioning that i bring to Genesis 4 in the next section. I jumped over the lines of tatau (tattoo) and fell into the tongue (language) of native Tongans. The three meanings discussed earlier are, however, not unique to Tongan speakers. Natives from other Pasifika groups (e.g. Niue, Tuvalu, Tokelau, Futuna, Samoa) also understand and share the same meanings, plus their own variations. I have taken this jump in order to locate the reading of Genesis 4 in the next section on the ground of Pasifika.

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Sign on Cain Cain did not get a tattoo (the text does not say that he did), but Yhwh placed a ‘sign’ or ‘mark’ (‫ )אות‬upon him. It is not clear what kind of sign it was, but its purpose was clear –​ to protect Cain: ‘And Yhwh put to Cain a sign (‫)אות‬, lest anyone who finds him would smite him’ (4.15b). There are other biblical characters who received some kind of sign, within (like the sign of Jonah in Mt. 16.4) and beyond (like the piercings of Jesus which became his stigmata) the bible, but their signs shed no light upon the sign on Cain. I am thus led, under the influence of th e insights on tātatau and tatau discussed earlier, to look around the story of Cain for clues toward understanding his ‫אות‬. My aim is not to offer another reading of Genesis 4,29 but to tatau (in the three senses of the word in Tongan) [the sign on] Cain. Several questions outline (but they do not preoccupy) the fol lowing tatau reading: Who and what else did the sign on Cain protect? Who and what else did the sign on Cain mark (read: expose)? The giving of the ‫ אות‬to Cain had to do with the ground (‫)אדמה‬. Reading backward: Cain was driven from ‘the face of the ground’ (Gen. 4.14a), which was cursed to not ‘yield its strength’ to Cain (Gen. 4.12). The ground had opened its mouth to receive the blood of Abel, which Cain denied (Gen. 4.9) to have spilled (G en. 4.11). The turning point for this reading is Gen. 4.10, where the text intersects two lines (blood and ground) in a tatau-​like symmetry: ‘The voice of the blood of your brother cried to me from the ground.’ This symmetry is clearer on the Samoan tongue, in which the word ‘ele’ele’ refers to both blood and soil or ground.30 The ground that earlier yielded to Cain (for he produced ‘frui t of the ground’ according to Gen. 4.3) allowed b lood to speak against Cain. The upshot: the ground was cursed, again, and Cain was banished from the ground, on account of the blood of Abel. The sign (‫ )אות‬was thus given in ord er to mark the banishment of Cain from the grou nd that dobbed him (Gen. 4.11), in the sense that the ground did not (in the interest of Cain) silence the blood of Abel. The ground shifted its allegiance from the tilling hands of Cain (Gen. 4.2) to the crying blood of Abel. This shift may be seen as betrayal, but it is expected in the Samoan mind because ground and blood are symmetrical lines that intersect in the word ‘ele’ele’. In this reading, blood (ele’ele) is tatau (equal) for ground (ele’ele).

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Cain is tatau (likeness) of his father. Cain was ‘tiller of the ground’ (Gen. 4.2), the task for which Adam was created (Gen. 2.5b) and charged (Gen. 2.15). Reading back from the story of Cain to the story of Adam raises the question: Who controls the ground? Yhwh cursed the ground to not yield to the tilling of Adam in Gen. 3.17–​19, but then Cain comes along with a gift ‘from the fruits of the ground’ as if the ground was not cursed (Gen. 4.3). Many readers blemish the gift of Cain, in comparison to the gift of firstlings and fat by Abel (Gen. 4.4), suggesting that this was the reason why Yhwh did not respect his gift. But nothing in the text suggests that Cain’s gift was withered and revolting. I  therefore suggest that Yhwh’s disrespect for Cain had a lot to do with Cain’s success in tilling the ground, and with Cain’s ability to break the curse that Yhwh placed on the ground. In this reading, Cain was asking for trouble, as if he was attempting to tatau (wring) Yhwh, when he brought ‘fruits of the ground’ before Yhwh in Gen. 4.3. The sign on Cain is consequently tatau (likeness) of the curse on the ground. Both were placed by Yhwh for the purpose of controlling the land and its ability to yield to (the blood, ele’ele, of) Cain. The foregoing reading invites a hop and a jump: from the sign of Cain to the ground and blood around him, to the cursed ground and the banished Adam, and to the male and female persons created in the likeness (tatau) of ‘Elohîm for the purpose of having dominion (control) over the sea, the heavens (air) and the earth (Gen. 1.26–​8). The sixth day of the Priestly creation story began with ‘Elohîm recognizing t he ability of earth (‫ )ארץ‬to ‘bring forth . . . living creatures’ (Gen. 1.24). But instead of waiting for earth to show its life-​giving capacities, as on day three (Gen. 1.12), ‘Elohîm created (‫ )ברא‬the male and female. Several lines of interpretation cross at this text, and i wish to add two observations in relation to the call, ‘Let us make ‘adam in our image, and in our likeness’ (Gen. 1.26). Who are here called to be the creators of ‘adam? First, there is a traditional assumption that ‘Elohîm is a singular being (the Jewish and Christian God) rather than a collective of beings (gods). But as Vaka’uta reminds us in his contribution to this book, ‘Elohîm is plural in form, and readers should not be blinded by the illusions of monotheistic faith. The Priestly creation account is therefore not about the work of one being (God), but the creation of a collective of ‘Elohîm (gods). In this regard, the ‘Elohîm who ‘began to create the heavens and the earth’ in Gen. 1.1 is tatau (equal)

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with the collective ‘Elohîm who spoke (‘Let us make . . . in our image’) in Gen. 1.26 and acted (‘And ‘Elohîm created’) in Gen. 1.27. Second, in honour of the way that tatau locates and roots Pasifika natives, there is an opportunity here to ground the creators in the Priestly account. There are several creators in the Priestly creation account, including the earth (which brought forth plants in Gen. 1.12) and the waters (with which ‘Elohîm plead to release water creatures for the sea and the air in Gen. 1.20). So when ‘Elohîm called for co-​creators to come together in the creation of ‘adam in their image and likeness (Gen. 1.26), i include the waters and the earth among them. The male and female were therefore not just images of ‘Elohîm, but the tatau (likeness) of the waters and the earth as well. Put more directly, humans are created in the image and likeness of ‘Elohîm, waters and earth. In this tatauing reading, the male and female of the Priestly creation story (Gen 1) are grounded in similar manners with the ‘adam of the Yahwist garden story (Gen. 2–​3). They all are from the ground. The sign of Cain provided him protection in preparation for his wandering, as a banished man, dismissed from the ground. The tatauing of Cain in this reading resists Yhwh’s curse of the ground, as tatau (read: blood) of Abel and tatau (read: wringer) of Cain, with the reminder that humans are creatures of the ground.

Notes 1. Tēvita O. Ka’ili, ‘Tauhi Vā: Creating Beauty through the Art of Sociospatial Relations’, PhD diss., University of Washington, 2008. 2. I use ‘Pasifika’ for the ‘sea of islands’ in the region otherwise known as the South Seas, Pacific Islands or Oceania. I prefer Pasifika (an indigenizing of ‘Pacific’) because it flows calmly on native tongues. 3. Steve Gilbert, Tattoo History: A Source Book (Hong Kong: Colorcraft Ltd., 2000), 11. 4. See Elena Govor, ‘“Speckled Bodies”: Russian Voyagers and Nuku Hivans, 1804’, in Tattoo: Bodies, Art, and Exchange in the Pacific and the West, ed. Nicholas Thomas, Anna Cole and Bronwen Douglas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 53–​71. 5. Gilbert, Tattoo History, 17.

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6. Margot Mifflin, Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo (Brooklyn: powerHouse, 2001), 4. 7. Peter Brunt, ‘The Temptation of Brother Anthony: Decolonization and the Tattooing of Tony Fomison’, in Thomas, Cole and Douglas (eds.), Tattoo, 124. 8. Sean Mallon, ‘Samoan Tatau as Global Practice’, in Thomas, Cole and Douglas (eds.), Tattoo, 158. 9. See Mifflin, Bodies of Subversion. 10. See Joanna White, ‘Marks of Transgression: The Tattooing of Europeans in the Pacific Islands’, in Thomas, Cole and Douglas (eds.), Tattoo, 72–​89. 11. The bible does not reject all cutting of the flesh. Circumcision is a case in point, according to which the cutting of the flesh is covenanted and sanctified. 12. Gilbert, Tattoo History, 15. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 20–​7, 39–​75, 164–​71. 15. I use the lowercase ‘i’ (except at the beginning of a sentence) because i also use the lowercase with you, she, we, he, they, it and others. This is a sign of my affirmation that i (as individual) do not exist without relating to others and to the surroundings, a sign of my resistance against the privileging of the so-​called independent modern self, and a sign of my rebellion against the colonial English language. 16. See the various essays in the volume by Thomas, Cole and Douglas (eds.), Tattoo. 17. Caroline Vercoe, ‘Art’, in The Pacific Islands: Environment and Society, rev. ed., ed. Moshe Rapaport (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013), 237. 18. Albert Wendt, ‘Tatauing the Post-​C olonial Body’, oral presentation at the Multi-​ethnic Literature Conference, Honolulu, University of Hawaii, 18 April 1997, available online: https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=vRgvGoGuiOk&n ohtml5=False; Albert Wendt, ‘Afterword: Tatauing the Postcolonial Body’, in Inside Out, Literature, Cultural Politics and Identity in the New Pacific, ed. V. H. R. Wilson (Lanham: Rowman, 1999), 399–​412. 19. Wendt, ‘Tatauing the Post-​C olonial Body’. 20. Ibid. 21. See Jione Havea, ‘Migration and Mission Routes/​Roots in Oceania’, in Migration and Church in World Christianity, ed. Elaine Padilla and Peter Phan (New York: Palgrave, 2016), 113–​34. 22. See Tavita Maliko, ‘O le Soga’imiti’: An Embodiment of God in the Samoan Male Body’, PhD diss., University of Auckland, 2012, 210. 23. As Vercoe observed, ‘Unlike the effects of colonization, the exchange and intermarriage that went on between different island groups did not result in homogenization, for cultures retained their distinctive identities’ (‘Art’, 237).

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24. One of the significant differences between Samoan and Māori patterns is that Samoan tatau interweave symmetrical lines whereas the Māori moko has more curves. The reason for this difference may be explained according to the placement of the moko on the (round) face and the tatau on the robust (burly) lower body. 25. Juniper Ellis, Tattooing the World: Pacific Designs in Print and Skin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 26. Ka’ili, ‘Tauhi Vā’, 17; my italics. 27. See Wendt, ‘Tatauing the Post-​C olonial Body’ and ‘Afterword’. 28. The words ‘image’ and ‘copy’ also come to mind, but the Tongan tatau (as in ngatu and tatau patterns) is not a duplicate or a reproduction. I opt to use ‘likeness’ because it gives room for the artist, and for the tatau pattern, to follow their own symmetrical lines. 29. See Jione Havea, ‘To Love Cain More Than God, in Other Words, “Nody” Gen 4:1–​16’, in Levinas and Biblical Studies, ed. Tamara C. Eskenazi, Gary A. Phillips and David Jobling (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 91–​112. 30. See Wendt, ‘Tatauing the Post-​C olonial Body’; Iutisone Salevao, ‘Burning the Land: An Ecojustice Reading of Hebrews 6:7–​8’, in Reading from the Perspectives of Earth, ed. Norman Habel (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 221–​31.

Bibliography Brunt, Peter. ‘The Temptation of Brother Anthony: Decolonization and the Tattooing of Tony Fomison’. In Thomas, Cole and Douglas (eds.), Tattoo, 123–​44. Ellis, Juniper. Tattooing the World: Pacific Designs in Print and Skin. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Gilbert, Steve. Tattoo History: A Source Book. Hong Kong: Colorcraft Ltd., 2000. Govor, Elena. ‘ “Speckled Bodies”: Russian Voyagers and Nuku Hivans, 1804’. In Thomas, Cole and Douglas (eds.), Tattoo, 53–​71. Havea, Jione. ‘Migration and Mission Routes/​Roots in Oceania’. In Migration and Church in World Christianity, edited by Elaine Padilla and Peter Phan, 113–​34. New York: Palgrave, 2016. Havea, Jione. ‘To Love Cain More Than God, in Other Words, “Nody” Gen 4:1–​16’. In Levinas and Biblical Studies, edited by Tamara C. Eskenazi, Gary A. Phillips and David Jobling, 91–​112. Atlanta: SBL, 2003. Ka’ili, Tēvita O. ‘Tauhi Vā: Creating Beauty through the Art of Sociospatial Relations’. PhD diss., University of Washington, 2008.

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Maliko, Tavita. ‘O le Soga’imiti: An Embodiment of God in the Samoan Male Body’. PhD diss., University of Auckland, 2012. Mallon, Sean. ‘Samoan Tatau as Global Practice’. In Thomas, Cole and Douglas (eds.), Tattoo, 145–​69. Mifflin, Margot. Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo. Brooklyn, NY: powerHouse, 2001. Salevao, Iutisone. ‘Burning the Land: An Ecojustice Reading of Hebrews 6:7–​8’. In Reading from the Perspectives of Earth, edited by Norman Habel, 221–​31. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000. Thomas, Nicholas, Anna Cole and Bronwen Douglas (eds.). Tattoo: Bodies, Art, and Exchange in the Pacific and the West. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Vercoe, Caroline. ‘Art’. In The Pacific Islands: Environment and Society, rev. ed., edited by Moshe Rapaport, 236–​47. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013. Wendt, Albert. ‘Afterword: Tatauing the Postcolonial Body’. In Inside Out, Literature, Cultural Politics and Identity in the New Pacific, edited by V. H. R. Wilson, 399–​ 412. Lanham, MD: Rowman, 1999. Wendt, Albert. ‘Tatauing the Post-​Colonial Body’. Oral presentation at the Multi-​ Ethnic Literature Conference, Honolulu, University of Hawaii, 18 April 1997. Available online: https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=vRgvGoGuiOk&nohtml5= False. White, Joanna. ‘Marks of Transgression: The Tattooing of Europeans in the Pacific Islands’. In Thomas, Cole and Douglas (eds.), Tattoo, 72–​89.

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Terry Stringer From Scripture to Sculpture Robin Woodward

Terry Stringer is one of New Zealand’s pre-​eminent contemporary sculptors (Figure 10.1).1 His creative output spans more than six decades, and the predominant form of his work is the human figure, modelled in clay or wax and then cast in bronze. Biblical subject matter is a vehicle through which he explores and analyses three-​dimensional form. However, the Bible is not alone in providing inspiration for Stringer who, in his search for subject matter, draws on a range of sources from the Western world. Modern life, the history of art, antiquity and classical mythology inform his work just as much as the Jewish and Christian narratives. In essence, all of these sources provide figurative and symbolic elements that the artist uses as forms through which he expresses his creative talent. Over the past four decades of New Zealand art history, Stringer’s name has been synonymous with one of the most ubiquitous forms of traditional art: figurative bronze sculpture. Even more specifically, his principal subject matter lies with the narratives historically associated with Western art, those from classical history and the Jewish and Christian traditions. The features these have in common include their basis in the human form, symbolism and a rich history of representation in art. Stringer constantly challenges himself to explore the potential of such subject matter in new ways. Herein lies a key to his engagement with the biblical narrative; Stringer uses the stories as vehicles for the analysis of form and to challenge the viewer’s perception of form

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Figure 10.1  Terry Stringer.

and concept. This is a significant point of distinction; more usually, artists use biblical subject matter to express and explore spirituality. The Bible and its message have figured in Stringer’s life since his childhood. He was brought up in a Christian household, initially in England and then in New Zealand after his family migrated in 1952. More than six decades later the influence is still in evidence. It is an informing concept behind much of his work at Zealandia, his home, studio and sculpture park at Mahurangi West, fifty kilometres north of Auckland.2 Some of the earliest examples of Christian content appear in Stringer’s works dating from the mid-​1970s. During these years, he made a number of hinged constructions which, in formal terms, have a reference point in the Christian triptych. Angel Triptych (1976) (Figures 10.2 and 10.3) is an excellent example. In form, material and working method, this sculpture characterizes Stringer’s work during the time he was establishing himself as a professional sculptor. The work is made up of three panels of plywood,

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Figure 10.2  Terry Stringer, Angel Triptych, 1976.

painted and hinged together. The central panel of the open triptych is a nude torso of a male; the side panels are the wings of an angel. When closed, the art work presents in the shape of a pair of hands. There is no three-​ dimensional modelling at all in Angel Triptych; the work is completely flat. All of the three-​dimensional form and nuance, including the details of the angel’s torso, the wings and the hands, are painted onto the plywood board, just as they would be in a traditional painting. Although Stringer is most well known as a sculptor, this work could be considered in the context of his paintings. Throughout his oeuvre, stories, themes and characters from the Bible have provided a framework for some of his forays into painting as well as for his sculpted works. In terms of the form of Angel Triptych, the reference point in Christian altarpieces is clearly reinforced by the title of the work. However, in a broader perspective, the design also signals something of the artist’s wide-​ranging

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Figure 10.3  Terry Stringer, Angel Triptych, 1976.

interests. Ever since his childhood, Stringer has been fascinated by pop-​up books and puzzles, and the similarity to the ‘open/​reveal’, ‘close/​conceal’ format of a pop-​up book is obvious in Angel Triptych. Thus the form of this work also has a reference point in the context of populist and commercial art practice. Touches such as this account in part for Stringer’s ongoing success in attracting a wide audience for his art. Stringer’s work in the 1970s is also an early indicator of his comprehensive knowledge of the history of popular culture, music and the visual arts –​ modern and traditional, local and international. In Resurrection (1976), these sources are explicitly cross-​referenced with the biblical. Like Angel Triptych, Resurrection is a painted, hinged work in the manner of a pop-​up book, but it has specific reference points in New Zealand art as well as within the broader context of classical music; each page of the book form carries a translated verse of Mozart’s 1791 Requiem.3 The entire tableau of an obelisk and central rising figure set against macrocarpa wood4 suggests a graveyard that is uncannily

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similar to the one in William (Bill) Sutton’s well-​known New Zealand painting Nor-​wester in the Cemetery (1950). Angel Triptych and Resurrection are but two of a number of biblical works in Stringer’s early oeuvre. Such subject matter is well represented in his output during the 1970s, but it virtually disappears over the next two decades when it is replaced by a focus on local modern content, specifically the domestic. The Bible re-​emerges as a significant force in the 1990s. However, any analysis must take into account the fact that Stringer’s subject matter seems almost incidental in relation to his interest in exploring form. In a body of work created over six decades, Stringer taps into sources as diverse as the domestic world, the realm of entertainment, classical mythology, European art history and the visual and performing arts in Aotearoa New Zealand –​as well as the biblical. Angel Triptych and Resurrection can in fact be regarded as early manifestations of Stringer’s exploration of three-​dimensional form, regardless of the source of the subject matter. In Stringer’s student days during the 1960s, very little figurative art was being made by his peers in New Zealand. Even more rarely did art make reference to the Christian or the mythological. However, Stringer was consciously out of step; he chose this stance, one of reinvention rather than imitation or reaction. His bent was to present a personal version of certain high art traditions that had a whole set of stories he could sculpt. The Christian and classical narratives might have undergone centuries of variations, but they were still readable to those familiar with their themes, characters and message. In the context of subject matter that has been worked and reworked so many times, particularly with its reference and resonance in the human figure, how can such well-​established narratives be reinvented and given a fresh lease of life? In terms of his presentation of the ­figure  –​and specifically the nude  –​ Stringer’s starting point is the European tradition, in particular the classicizing of the female nude in nineteenth-​century art. However, from the outset this sculptor has always been in step with others who are re-​evaluating the cultural roots of colonial Aotearoa New Zealand. He does not take the view that he is working within a tradition. Rather, he is trying to review the tradition from a distance, re-​creating something very old-​fashioned in a new way.5 He looks at ways of distancing his subjects from earlier interpretations, and to this end

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he is comfortable with including modern accessories such as cigarettes and spectacles in his figurative subjects. Although Stringer’s Christian and classical characters are not modernized in such a manner, a new and distinctive time and space are created for them. This is achieved through his adoption of elements from a variety of art historical styles and contexts.6 He employs graphic and painterly treatments of three dimensions by putting oil paint on sculptures. He explores formal ideas such as compression, exaggeration, emphasis and simplification. He flattens forms or uses space as form. In fact one could say that Stringer does not prioritize the figurative subject but uses it to carry formal ideas. His focus is on examining the possibilities inherent in the three dimensional, which he presents through narrative subjects –​be they biblical, classical or genre scenes. In the mid-​1970s this particular approach resulted in everything in his work having sharp corners or forms being flattened out. It was a phase in which somewhat paradoxically Stringer would elide the two and three dimensional.7 No matter what his subject matter, in those years Stringer would typically make a plywood cut-​out with a painting on it. Then he would make and paint another, which he would attach to the first, building up a narrative as he built up a form. This was his process with Angel Triptych and Resurrection; effectively he was making two-​dimensional work which had volume added pictorially. Stringer’s focus on Christian subject matter re-​emerged in the mid-​1990s. Many of these pieces are large works –​over-​life-​size human ­figures –​which were created during the establishment of the sculptor’s outdoor gallery and sculpture park, Zealandia.8 A significant increase in the size of his studio, and the extensive outdoor display space offered at Zealandia, afforded Stringer the opportunity to create art on a larger scale than had been feasible in earlier years when he had lived and worked in his apartment/​studio in inner city Auckland. Stringer turned to biblical and mythological narratives as he began to explore the potential inherent in creating the figurative form on a larger scale. Susanna and the Elders (1998) (Figure  10.4) is an exceptional example of the style that Stringer developed in the mid-​1990s. By this time, he had been working as a sculptor for over thirty years and had become acutely conscious of the fact that the Western eye traditionally reads mass as sculptural form. What effect might it have if he shifted his focus to the interplay

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Figure 10.4  Terry Stringer, Susanna and the Elders, 1998.

of space with mass, and the part that space could play in trompe l’oeil?9 To this end, Stringer began to create his sculptural shapes out of space. Indeed, space became such an integral part of his sculpture that to miss the reading of its shape could lead to missing the meaning of a work. In Susanna and the Elders he explores this effect through the incorporation of what Stringer calls a ‘cut away face’; that is, the shape that space forms as it meets the mass of Susanna is itself a face. In the history of art, the apocryphal tale of Susanna and the Elders is a subject more common to painting than sculpture, and is usually a group study in which the focus is on the naked Susanna, the unsuspecting object of the voyeuristic Elders (Susanna 7–​21). Stringer’s Susanna may still be an unwitting player, but in his work she becomes more intimately involved with the Elders; her form is literally created by their gaze. The profiles of the Elders are physically forced in on Susanna from each side; they form the silhouette of her body. Susanna is imposed upon forever by the peeping faces of the Elders, who are permanently impressed into the form she takes. Although decorated by the

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finery of her pearls, and with her modesty protected by her fig-​leaf hand, she still cannot escape being defined and confined by her persecutors. Her form –​ and the public’s image and perception of her –​do not exist independently of the imposition of the Elders’ presence and their power. We cannot view her without seeing the Elders’ point of view. Such power and gender roles in life and art are themes that can be cross-​referenced in a broad range of subject matter throughout Stringer’s oeuvre. During the 1990s while increasingly exploring the potential of space, Stringer still focuses on mass as the primary material in many of his works. The Kiss of Judas (1998) and The Doubting of Thomas (1998) herald a return to the columnar form of figurative statuary in his sculpture. In The Doubting of Thomas (based on the gospel tradition of Jn 20.24–​9), the narrative takes the form of the union of the torso of one figure (Christ) with the head of another (Thomas); Christ and Thomas are presented as one monolithic unit. Similarly, in his representation of the story of Judas, the sculptor models the heads of Christ and Judas so that they take on the appearance of a pillar comprising the singular form of the head of Christ with a profile relief of Judas wrapped around it. Through this descriptive statement incised into the mass, the composition suggests Judas’s kiss, recorded in Mt. 26.47–​50 and Mk 14.43–​5; thus Judas’s act is forever imposed on Christ, whose fate in turn is eternally linked with Judas. In this work, Stringer gives visual form to the theme of betrayal and encourages exploration of the psychological implications to an extent more commonly encountered in painting than sculpture. Both The Kiss of Judas and The Doubting of Thomas present the complexity –​and the fallibility –​of humankind and the individual. In The Kiss of Judas, the idea that forces for good and evil are present in each individual is communicated by combining the good (Jesus Christ) and the betrayer (Judas) in a single form. The same interaction of theme, form and content occurs in The Doubting of Thomas where Christ and Thomas combine in the single act of doubt (Thomas) and belief (resurrection of Christ). The fact that incredulity and Christian belief can coexist within one individual is presented here through the single form. In this way the artist addresses the ambiguities inherent in us all, in our actions as well as in our being. In the apparently unselfish gesture of reaching out to another, Thomas is simply filling his own need; and

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the kiss of Judas is at once the vehicle of love and of betrayal, the incarnation of both good and evil. When The Kiss of Judas was first displayed at Lopdell House Gallery in Auckland, Stringer designed a canopy fretted out of sheet brass which was patinated so that the scene could be presented within the narrative accuracy of its original outdoor garden setting. The concern with defining, framing and presentation recalls Gianlorenzo Bernini’s huge Baldacchino in St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican (1623–​34).10 In the Lopdell House setting, however, a backdrop of tree ferns transports the Christian story and the kiss of Judas from the garden of Gethsemane to Aotearoa New Zealand. This fern-​framed temporary shrine, with its outlook over New Zealand bush, is chronologically and geographically distant from Bernini’s masterpiece in St Peter’s, but it is an outward, physical manifestation of shared Christian content. In The Kiss of Judas and The Doubting of Thomas, iconography, biblical narrative and the history of art are all drawn together in Stringer’s examination of the universal human condition. Both works expose forces and influences –​ physical, emotional and spiritual –​that determine identity. In the gospel story, the mortal Thomas demonstrates doubt through needing and seeking out tangible evidence of the stigmata as proof of the resurrection. In his turn, Judas fails both the Son and the heavenly Father by his earthly act of betrayal. The failure of the son in the eyes of the F/​father is addressed through the veil of biblical imagery in both pieces of sculpture. Thus, one must raise the question of an autobiographical element in Stringer’s work. The father/​son relationship most definitely informs The Shoes of the Father (1998). This is a sculpture that works on a range of allegorical levels as well as formal ones. The familial theme becomes universal as the father (human) becomes also the Father (God). A key indicator of this elision lies in the representation of the feet, overlapped as those of Christ on the cross, and the nail hole of the stigmata which pierces the naked, earthly flesh of the bare foot. In a typical multiplicity of form and image there is also a profile face formed in the foot of the F/​father –​H/​his children are formed in H/​his image. This face, like the figurehead on a ship, points the way for the S/​son to follow in his F/​ father’s footsteps. Throughout the late 1990s, Stringer’s work reveals a shift into an exploration of the explicitly personal relevance of the Christian story. His sculpture

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becomes ever more personal (and simultaneously more universal) as he focuses on the relationships and psychological complexities of the individual. This emerges unambiguously in Self Portrait as Christ (1998) in which Stringer identifies with the pain of the Pietà and with the suffering of the Son. In this self-​portrait, Stringer becomes the Son of God, and through this, ‘everyman’. He extends the analogy by indicating that this is not just a twentieth-​century condition –​or an exploration of a passing fancy –​by the obvious reference to Albrecht Dürer’s famous self-​portrait (1500). The quotation of this well-​known art historical precedent gives a sense of Stringer identifying closely with Dürer specifically, as well as presenting the notion of the historically mandated role of the artist in society as philosopher, commentator, critic and conscience. Self Portrait as Christ is distinctive in Stringer’s oeuvre in that it is a direct quotation of the work of an earlier artist. Very few of Stringer’s sculptures employ this device despite the fact that in his biblical pieces, the sculptor is working with a subject matter steeped in tradition. Annunciation Lamp (1996) (Figures 10.5, 10.6 and 10.7) is also exceptional in that here the artist employs three fragments from the Leonardo da Vinci Annunciation (1472–​75). In each of these, the face of Mary, the face of the angel of the annunciation and the angel’s hand is set on a different face of an obelisk. The work is illuminated by the glow of an electric light bulb set inside the obelisk, effectively imbuing the annunciation (and the Leonardo precedent) with an inner light. Through openings in the bronze, the hand of the angel is illuminated and the head is haloed, while the Virgin appears to radiate light. In its flattened forms, Annunciation Lamp clearly relates back to Stringer’s biblical sculpture from the 1970s, and, as it is a functional domestic lamp, there are links also to the functional aspect and still-​life content that characterize his domestic subjects of the 1980s.11 It must be recognized that the Christian themes in Stringer’s work have a constant companion in the classical. In some works, the two are combined: Venus in the Head of Jesus (2005) is one such sculpture. In this large-​ scale bust, one view presents the head of Jesus as a boy. Turn the work ninety degrees and the temple of Venus is revealed. Stringer’s point is clear –​these two traditions, the strongest ones in Western art, are not mutually exclusive. When Jesus walked the shores of Galilee, the predominant belief within his

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Figure 10.5  Terry Stringer, Annunciation Lamp, 1996.

immediate cultural context of the first-​century Roman world was still pagan in observation and worship. By presenting both views in a single sculpture Stringer reinforces the discourse that characterizes his work. This is most distinctive in Mother and Child with Three Instruments of the Passion (2001) (Figures 10.8 and 10.9). Mother and Child with Three Instruments of the Passion is made in traditional bust form. However, unlike the conventional bust which has a principal viewing point, in this particular sculpture the passage to meaning is circuitous. The viewer is invited to travel around the head and, in the journey, they discover a series of images, each with distinctive features, but with shared silhouettes. Moreover, each image multitasks by fulfilling a formal function as well as being part of an episodic narrative. As examples, the profile of the Madonna/​ mother becomes the veil of St Veronica which protectively frames and iconicizes the Son crowned with thorns. The formal fusion of attributes of the Virgin mother and St Veronica unites these figures as nurturers and caregivers.

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Figure 10.6  Terry Stringer, Annunciation Lamp, 1996.

As the viewer moves around the sculpture, the veil is lifted, and it delivers a rhyming image and form –​an elongated hand clasping a further instrument of the Passion, a nail, presented in the form of an inverted teardrop. The nailing of the hand to the cross signifies the end of the physical journey of Christ. But in Stringer’s sculpture the hand is not impaled, as in the Crucifixion, but instead it is holding the nail. Is this, therefore, the hand of God –​or of Christ’s accuser? It could be either –​or both –​and if it is the hand of the creator then it is also the hand of the artist. If the latter should apply, then Stringer is infusing what is ostensibly a biblical narrative with a personal reference and the work becomes autobiographical. This serves to reinforce the universality of the story. Within one simple head lie narrative and formal features which tell the story sequentially. It is the story of one mother and her child –​a universal story told in singular form. In this respect Mother and Child with Three Instruments of the Passion resonates with Stringer’s earlier Self Portrait as Christ.

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Figure 10.7  Terry Stringer, Annunciation Lamp, 1996.

By having to move around a sculpture to read its form and story, the viewer is physically drawn into Stringer’s agenda of controlling and manipulating the viewing point and the viewpoint. Hand-​held pieces that can be picked up and turned from side to side similarly involve the viewer with the work, as does the incorporation of text. Tear Tear (1995) introduces text into the narrative of form and subject. In this work, the head and hand of Christ are separated by a line of light, a space that takes the symbolic form of a nail. The raised text ‘TEAR’ on one side of the divide relates to the teardrop flowing down the face of Christ. On the other side of the rent another ‘TEAR’ references the cause of his pain –​the tear in the flesh caused by the piercing of the nail. Such a distinctive interaction of mass and space in a hand-​held work of art is continued in Millennium Medallion (2000), a work with which Stringer commemorated the new millennium. In Millennium Medallion the line of light seen in Tear Tear becomes a candle with its burning flame. Across the eternal flame, in the light

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Figure  10.8  Terry Stringer, Mother and Child with Three Instruments of the Passion, 2001.

of the resurrection, one gazes at the face of Christ. The inscription reads ‘2000 YEARS THIS ERA’. It is during the 1990s that Christian subject matter figures most strongly in Stringer’s sculpture, culminating in the large-​scale three-​piece suite of works, Faith, Hope and Love (1999), commissioned for St Cuthbert’s College in Auckland.12 The phrase ‘Faith, hope and love’, taken from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 13.13), is the school motto. Stringer’s trilogy, Faith, Hope and Love, which stands in the grounds of the college, is multifaceted. When read from varying viewpoints, the three separate figures interrelate to present three distinct tableaux. From one side, the three forms manifest as an outdoor pastoral scene with two figures dancing around a central cypress tree. From

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Figure  10.9  Terry Stringer, Mother and Child with Three Instruments of the Passion, 2001.

another view, they suggest the annunciation, and from a third viewing point the forms read as a still-​life grouping of a chalice, rose and candle. Such integration and assimilation of imagery characterizes a series of large-​ scale works on the biblical themes that were created by Stringer for Zealandia sculpture park in the early years of the twenty-​first century. Charity (1999), a variation on Love (from Faith, Hope and Love), leads the way, followed by The Baptism of Christ (2000) (Figure 10.10) and Private View (2003) (Figure 10.11). Charity incorporates the traditional images of charity, a woman’s face and that of a child feeding, while from another viewing point it is swathed in the veil of St Veronica with the face of Christ on it. From one viewing point The Baptism of Christ presents as a haloed head, from another it is a conjunction of the head of Christ, a baptismal bowl and the arm of John the Baptist. Private View refines this concept.

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Figure 10.10  Terry Stringer, The Baptism of Christ, 2000.

The full-​length figure in Private View is at first glance a representation of a pregnant Virgin Mary. With her head bowed in humility, she appears to be contemplating her unborn child; but to read and comprehend this work fully, the privileged eye must be invoked. Here Stringer is exploring the use of a privileged viewing point, that is, one specific place from which the forms of a sculpture are aligned in such an arrangement that an additional ‘reading’ of the work is accessible. In Private View, looking down through the halo that circles the head of the Virgin allows the portrait of Mary to transform and disclose the head of Christ. By controlling the viewing point to reveal this vision, Stringer presents the annunciation. Additionally, we experience the incarnation, as the Virgin’s body becomes the body of Christ; through her form, his is created, and her halo becomes his. This manner of manipulating the appearance and the presentation of an image is based on the principle of the traditional peepshow. Stringer is using the technical means of a peephole to control the viewing point (and view) of the spectator.13 This aspect brings to mind his

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Figure 10.11  Terry Stringer, Private View, 2003.

earliest biblical works, Angel Triptych and Resurrection, in which the artist invoked another form of popular culture, the pop-​up book. The outdoor park-​like grounds at Zealandia offered Stringer the opportunity to continue to develop his formal and narrative ideas in large-​scale works. The most extensive of these is the Zealandia Calvary (2006–​2008) (Figure 10.12) in which the sculptor employs the religious resonance of the Stations of the Cross to add form to the sculptural enhancement of a pathway through an ancient stand of kauri trees. The path leads to a 1,000-​year-​old kauri that was once struck by lightning but which regenerated and has regrown from each fork of its split trunk. The presentation of sculpture on the Zealandia Calvary was inspired by the Stations of the Cross at Rocamadour in the Dordogne, which Stringer and his partner, Tim McWhannell, had visited in the mid-​1990s. The Rocamadour Calvary is built on a rocky outcrop and designed as a zigzag path with a sculpture at each change of direction along the pilgrim’s way. The visitor is greeted with an image at each bend in the path and then, immediately after

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Figure 10.12  Terry Stringer, Zealandia Calvary, 2006–​2008.

the turn, there is a new image visible ahead at the approach to the next set of steps. Stringer designed his Zealandia Calvary similarly; however, his has seven bends in the pathway down through the forest, with two images at each turn, one for the outward journey and a different one for the return. Thus, there is an image ahead of the visitor from whichever approach; fourteen images in all, seven on the way down, and a different seven on the way back up. Characteristically, Stringer researched his project through the annals of art history. He quotes examples as diverse as McCahon’s sequences of fourteen (see later), Eric Gill’s sculptural relief series Stations of the Cross (1914–​18) at Westminster Cathedral, London, and Stanley Spencer’s Christ Carrying the Cross (1920; Tate, London), a painting that was partly suggested by accounts of the funeral of Queen Victoria. Conceptually, Stringer considered a number of themes for his Calvary and ultimately, his Stations are not traditionally biblical in derivation. This process of conceiving the work references the practice of McCahon who used a sequence, in his case a pattern of numbers, that works in the manner of the Stations of the Cross. Without ever specifically illustrating these Stations, McCahon referenced them repeatedly through the metaphor of the numbers one to fourteen –​fourteen being the number of images presented

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in a Stations series. Stringer’s Zealandia Calvary is also an ordering system, a formal reference that has a resonance rather than being a direct biblical narrative. Sculpturally, his Zealandia Stations of the Cross are all variations on the formal idea of a face, and the sculptor’s consideration of the biblical text is tempered by a more specific local focus on the forest, its demise and rebirth through felling and regeneration. The Zealandia Calvary greets the visitor with a signpost sculpture at each end of the trail and a metaphorical piece in the middle, the Rata Totem. This work, at the midpoint of the Calvary, is formed from a hand, leaves and a face crowned by flowers of the northern rata, a plant that climbs up a host tree, aspiring towards the light. The form of Rata Totem is a variation on the same group seen individually in each Station. The smaller works at each Station are etiolated, elongated visages that echo the shape of the trees; these are the dryads of the forest. Each is supported by a pole, tall and so thin that, like a tree that is weakened, sickly, drained of vigour and colour, it registers only as you come close. Every work becomes important as you move up to it, but in the overall journey, each one is minor. The formal arrangement common to all of these is a regular wave-​like shape which turns into a face on one side. On the other, there is a variation on hands and hair, which have a scallop-​shaped profile in recognition of the traditional symbol and badge of Christian pilgrims who travel to the shrine of the apostle James at Santiago de Compostela in Galicia.14 In Stringer’s reference point, the Rocamadour Calvary, there is a natural grotto at the end of the pilgrimage; the grotto houses an entombment which, in the Christian story, is distinct from the Stations of the Cross, but it is still a major event within the narrative. Similarly, with the Zealandia Calvary, Stringer takes advantage of the physical configuration of the environment to add images to his version of the theme. A striking example is the Sacred Heart Figure of Christ, a painted wooden figure from the nineteenth-​century German school, which is placed beside the walkway. Facing into the forest, this figure is not seen by those venturing out on the Calvary; it is visible only on the return. Despite its weathering, this life-​sized damaged figure of Christ retains features of its original wood carving, gesso preparation and descriptive paint finish. Set in a brass and glass case that mixes the traditions of museological and ecclesiastical presentation, what was originally a tree trunk has been returned to the forest from whence it came.

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Beyond the sculpture at Zealandia, the most significant of Stringer’s works on the Christian theme is his bronze Risen Christ (2000) (Figure  10.13) in Christchurch, New Zealand. This sculpture was Christ Church Cathedral’s millennium gift to the city of its name. Standing on Christ Church Cathedral land, the work was originally sited beside the west doors of the now earthquake-​ stricken place of worship.15 Stringer intended the work to act as an interface between the Cathedral and the broad expanse of the adjoining Cathedral Square. Thus, he conceived of Christ as a figure walking in the Square rather than as a more traditional statue elevated on a pedestal. His idea was to present the figure of the Jewish Christ honoured by being wrapped in a feathered cloak on his arrival in Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. As part of this concept, Christ’s usual long hair is pulled back and tied behind. Unlike many of the sculptor’s works, the Risen Christ has a principal viewing point. There is a spiral movement within the figure, with the head facing one way, the feet another, and an encircling flow of line defining the piece. The turn and twist within the figure is designed to present a gesture of welcome; Christ faces the Cathedral but turns to welcome people from the Square.

Figure 10.13  Terry Stringer, Risen Christ, 2000.

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Throughout Stringer’s oeuvre, biblical stories, themes and characters have provided a framework and a vehicle through which he explores and analyses three-​dimensional form. Aspects of the Christian story have been recounted in a range of materials and through forms as diverse as painted two-​dimensional constructions, curvilinear columnar pieces and hand-​held medallions. Biblical subject matter has been explored through the equivocal effects achieved by incorporating artificial light into sculpture or by switching perspective from a reading of mass to a reading of space. Ultimately, by relinquishing the traditional principal viewing point in favour of an all-​round perspective, the sculptor rewards viewers who walk around his work, treating them to an episodic narrative. Thus, Stringer constantly manipulates traditional representation of form in sculpture while, in works illustrating biblical subject matter, he enhances and challenges the viewer’s understanding and knowledge of the Judaeo-​Christian narrative.

Notes 1. Terry Stringer (ONZM) was born in 1946 at St Ives in Cornwall, England, and has lived in New Zealand since the age of six. After leaving school he studied at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, graduating DipFA (Hons) in 1967. In the following years, he received virtually every significant scholarship and award available to artists in New Zealand. His signature works have become synonymous with high-​profile public sites throughout Aotearoa New Zealand, and his sculpture park Zealandia has become a symbol of New Zealand’s finest art. 2. Zealandia Sculpture Garden was opened in the year 2000. Its future is currently under consideration as Stringer and his partner Tim McWhannell contemplate moving back to the city. 3. Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D minor (1791), left unfinished on his death in December of that year. 4. Macrocarpa is a durable softwood grown in New Zealand. 5. All views attributed to Terry Stringer are from his conversations with the author in preparation for this chapter and for an earlier chapter on his biblical work: Robin Woodward, ‘The Form of Christian Art: Biblical Subject Matter in the Sculpture of Terry Stringer’, Journal of New Zealand Art History 32 (2011): 94–​111. Other discussions of Stringer’s work include Stephen Ellis, ‘The Sculpture of Terry Stringer’, Art New Zealand 13 (1979): 20–​1; Kevin Ireland, ‘Recent Work of

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Terry Stringer’, Art New Zealand 55 (1990): 58–​61; Laurence Simmons, ‘Tables/​ Tableaux’, Art New Zealand 32 (1984): 38–​41, 60; Robin Woodward, ‘Explore and Discover’, World Sculpture News 16, no. 2 (2010): 29–​31; Robin Woodward, ‘The Artist’s Hand and Eye: Terry Stringer’s Personal Museum’, Art New Zealand 89 (1998–​99): 48–​51, 87; Elizabeth Caughey and John Gow, Contemporary New Zealand Art 2 (Auckland: David Bateman, 1999), 30–​5. Stringer has often commissioned short catalogues or fold-​outs to accompany his exhibitions. The most significant of these are Penelope Jackson, Terry Stringer –​Landscape of the Head (Tauranga: Tauranga Art Gallery, 2014) and Robin Woodward, Terry Stringer Living in My Head (Auckland: Te Tuhi, 2001). 6. In this there are resonances with Colin McCahon, particularly McCahon’s use of comic strip features in his early illustrations of the Christian story. For more information on McCahon, see, for example, Gordon Brown, Colin McCahon Artist (Auckland: Reed, 1984). 7. For example, Dramatic Gesture (1977, painted wood) and Falling Woman (1973, painted wood and resin). In Falling Woman a modelled leg and hip support a cut-​out illusionistic upper body with a raised leg. 8. There are two principal articles on Zealandia: Keith Stewart, ‘A Language of Promise’, Architecture New Zealand (July/​August 2000): 38–​48; Robin Woodward, ‘Art Outdoors: Three New Zealand Sculpture Parks’, Art New Zealand 99 (Winter 2001): 70–​3, 105. Zealandia is also featured in Peter Shaw, A History of New Zealand Architecture (Auckland: Hodder Moa Beckett, 1997). 9. Trompe l’oeil is a term used in traditional Western art history in relation to art works that have a deliberate ambiguity regarding the presentation of space in a composition. The term is most commonly used in relation to painting, but plays a significant role in Stringer’s sculpture of the 1990s. 10. The baldacchino in St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican City is a large Baroque, sculpted bronze canopy over the high altar and directly under the dome of the basilica. Acting as a visual focus within the basilica, it was designed by Bernini to mark, in a monumental way, the place of St Peter’s tomb. 11. Such features are not restricted to Stringer’s biblical works. In the mid-​to-​late 1990s, the sculptor Stringer created a number of works that were designed to function as lamps. Rose Lamp (1998) is one such example. 12. St Cuthbert’s College is an independent Christian school in the Presbyterian tradition. Stringer’s sculpture stands beside the main entrance driveway to the school. 13. Stringer has employed the device of a physical peephole over a number of years. Absent Friends (2000, bronze) in the enclosed garden at Zealandia relies on aligning two forms from a singular viewing point. In 2004 he exhibited a work at Zealandia entitled A Peep Show (bronze).

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14. The scallop shell became popular with pilgrims on the St James Way which leads to the apostle’s shrine at Santiago de Compostela. During the Medieval period, Christians on this pilgrimage would often wear a scallop shell brooch or symbol on their clothes. Some also carried a scallop shell to present at churches, castles and abbeys, where according to tradition, they could expect to receive as much sustenance as they could gather with one scoop. 15. This sculpture has survived the major earthquakes that have wreaked havoc in Christchurch, affecting heritage and populace alike. The work is currently in storage awaiting redevelopment of Cathedral Square as part of the rebuilding of the city in the wake of the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes.

Bibliography Caughey, Elizabeth, and John Gow. Contemporary New Zealand Art 2. Auckland: David Bateman, 1999. Dunn, Michael. New Zealand Sculpture: A History. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2002. Ellis, Stephen. ‘The Sculpture of Terry Stringer’. Art New Zealand 13 (1979): 20–​1. Ireland, Kevin. ‘Recent Work of Terry Stringer’. Art New Zealand 55 (1990): 58–​61. Jackson, Penelope. Terry Stringer –​Landscape of the Head. Tauranga: Tauranga Art Gallery, 2014. Shaw, Peter. A History of New Zealand Architecture. Auckland: Hodder Moa Beckett, 1997. Simmons, Laurence. ‘Tables/​Tableaux’. Art New Zealand 32 (1984): 38–​41, 60. Stewart, Keith. ‘A Language of Promise’. Architecture New Zealand (July/​August 2000): 38–​48. Woodward, Robin L. ‘Art Outdoors: Three New Zealand Sculpture Parks’. Art New Zealand 99 (2001): 70–​3, 105. Woodward, Robin L. ‘The Artist’s Hand and Eye: Terry Stringer’s Personal Museum’. Art New Zealand 89 (1998–​99): 48–​51, 87. Woodward, Robin L. ‘Explore and Discover’. World Sculpture News 16, no. 2 (2010): 29–​31. Woodward, Robin L. ‘The Form of Christian Art: Biblical Subject Matter in the Sculpture of Terry Stringer’. Journal of New Zealand Art History 32 (2011): 94–​111. Woodward, Robin L. Terry Stringer Living in My Head. Auckland: Te Tuhi, 2001.

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Berēšît Countersigning Maria O’Connor’s Equus’ Ashes with Derrida’s L’animal Yael Klangwisan

‘Equus’ Ashes’ or ‘Dark Light’ is an essay film directed by Maria O’Connor (M.O.) and exhibited as a film installation ‘Ecce Equus’ at St Paul St Gallery in 2014. The film is available online at circuit.org.nz (Circuit: Artist Film and Video Aotearoa New Zealand). This chapter poetically brings together the shadowed, archetypal memory of Genesis 1–​3 as it resonates in the creative work of Maria O’Connor on the philosophical question of the animal, and in parallel, the philosophy of Jacques Derrida in his explorations of the human-​animal relation. . . . Derrida is naked at the beginning of Genesis in L’animal que donc je suis. In the first Cerisy lecture, 1997, he brings us to an imaginary; the time before time, at the founding of the world. He appears naked here in order to cross a certain border. To return to that moment when a boundary had not yet been fashioned. The break or the separation,

—​berēšît (in the first step, at the head, in the beginning) At the beginning of the film the black leader leads to lit text. Black then light. In the beginning of the film, out of the darkness, out of the resonance of a primordial, relentless dirge, light appears. Light masquerading as text. Dark light. Polyluminous. Refracted on the mist, on the vapour that emerges, separated from the nothing, ex nihilo, skin, horsehair. The inside concealed beneath an organic sheath, waters outside separated from waters inside. Skin and bone. The inside is revealed only by breath, by vapour, expressed into the coldness of the pre-​dawn. Blood is concealed. Alone, at the beginning of the film, the birth of the animal.

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the division of waters from waters, and flesh from flesh. As Derrida writes, he goes there ‘to surrender to the animal’. He goes to the time of the animal, when the animal was also the man, a living creature: nepeš ḥayah.

—​tōṣē hāareṣ nepeš ḥayah . . . (Gen. 1.24)

then the Lord God fashioned the human, humus from the soil . . . and the human became a living creature . . . And the Lord God fashioned from the soil each beast of the field and each fowl of the heavens . . . and whatever the human called the living creature, that was its name. (Gen. 2.7–​8, 19)1

M.O.: Darkness Leads to the Gaze Bottomless And what Does this offer my sight? What does it “say” to me? It says The truth of me through the eyes of the other ‘Eyes’ seen and forgotten . . . Abyssal void Infinite becoming The beginning is a relation between life and death. The continuity of the void, oblivion, nothingness. Can anything escape the darkness? The viewer awakes to the spectacle of light. The spectacle of another’s being; a somnambulent dream of the animal other.

A man was also naked at the beginning of Babylonian time; quite some time before Genesis and there: The Goddess Aruru, she washed her hands, Took a pinch of clay, threw it down in the wild.2

Aruru made a man animal. He had long streaming hair ‘like that of a woman’s’ writes the poet, as if feminity itself blurs the borders between man and animal for the Babylonians: coated in hair like the god of the animals, With the gazelles he grazes on grass

Ecce Equus. Rise horse, though you have been made ice-​cold. All your states of matter. Fire, earth, water, air. Beginning or ending. The birth or death of the elemental. Universal horse. Primordial horse. Clothed by words. A  polyglot of murmurings. Animots. Animages. Layers of sound, image and text. Movement, silence, darkness enveloped in shadows. Grazing. Steaming. Flowing. On fire. Smoke. Incense. Maria’s quest is to reveal the truth. The truth of the animal as uncanny, unmastered and forgotten. The seduction of the philosophical, poetic, literary, and the aesthetic. Words moulded like clay into

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Joining the throng with the game at the water-​hole His heart delighting with the beasts in the water.3

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the form of the horse or just words. A succession of philosophers bearing their fear of death like a cross. Slaughtering and bleeding the animal again and again like temple priests. I hear her voice in the film? But is it horse? Elle’s

In the case of the naked voice is woman’s. Woman transmuted as horse, or humanimal, Enkidu, it took horse personified. It is as if she is also in question a woman to bring him across like the animal. Erased by the question. She is at the the animal-​ human divide, mercy of the question. In danger of sacrifice to it. An invisible woman hidden by her voice. Uncanny, the journey of nights from unmastered and erased. Her voice merges with the the herds to the cities of men. form of Equus. Synethesia. Metonymy. A  horse’s She was ‘other’, a revealer form but it is a woman’s voice that speaks for it. of secrets, of mysteries, the A Cixousian promethea; an uncanny merging that gateway to civilization in brings a primal memory to the fore, of these two voiceless others, woman and animal, named in contrast to masculinity’s the beginning by the first man, both cast outside of originally innocent affinity language. with wilderness and animalBut the truth of the film is visual. Language is full ity.4 Not so in Eden, woman of lies. doesn’t yet exist. Adam does, M.O.: They both searched for poverty in language. On and he is there alone. In the this point, they agreed. For her there were always too ancient and formative texts many words and one word too many. of Genesis and its even older relative, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the question of the animal is bared, unveiled, as is the question of woman. And via a route of exclusion both questions are put away. The animal has not been ‘seen’, not since the concerns of civilization always already take first place and have done so from the beginning of language, in the world’s oldest text. It is both compelling and illuminating then when Derrida poignantly recreates the Garden of Eden in his home in Ris-​Orangis and utilizes this mise-​en-​scène for his first lecture. The two central characters in Derrida’s Garden are the nude Derrida and his cat. It is with these two figures he seeks to deconstruct philosophy’s and consequentially theology’s animal blindness. The most constant aspect of Derrida’s concern with the question of the animal is evident in his efforts to underscore the anthropocentric dimensions of ontotheological humanism.5

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Why Genesis? Why is Derrida here? Derrida inscribes himself as the new Adam in Eden, because this is where, as he puts it, a powerful law concerning animals is legislated. It’s the authoritative press of Genesis on philosophical treatment of the question of the animal that is at stake.

Shame. (Pudeur). Is it shame that covers the moving images with clothes made of text? Subtitles interrupting the purity of the image, clothing it, veiling it, in part. Apparel-​words. Words like fig-​leaves. As if the bareness, the exposure, the sense of being seen by the animal. Caught without address. The viewer spied in flagrante. The animal as spectacle. The accusing muteness. Voyeurs clothing themselves in murmuring words.

That would be the law of an unperturbable logic, both Promethan and Adamic, both Greek and Abrahamic .  .  . Its invariance hasn’t stopped being verified all the way to our modernity.6

According to Derrida, Genesis continues to demarcate our relation to the animal to this day. The stories of beginnings in Genesis are punctuated. At first I and Derrida, in the position of the reader, are very far away, with the bennu bird’s view through a god’s eye (or a council of gods’ eyes). Adrift against the roof of stars as the hammered earthscape curves slightly concave around us. The reader is immaterial, timeless, omniscient. We might not see closely, but we see all. As Lacocque describes it:

These lines from the screenplay are subtitled in English, translated aloud in French, German, Italian, further veiled by a poignant soundtrack while the ethereal images of the horse steam and move, veiled in darkness on the screen. The animals say nothing, in contrast to the babel of voices that accompany each scene. It is a kaleidoscope in its cacophony of sounds and sights. Yet the voices highlight the silence of the animal. Visually, the primal, shadowed scenes of the horse provide the strongest layer of meaning, and like a silhouette of the text and photography of Derrida’s ‘Aletheia’, provides a stark witness to the animal, and the silence of it. The animal in the scene refuses to answer the question of the animal. Its silence and mystery thoroughly rejecting the question. M.O.: The human sees

With shame and pity. Reflects optically Foresees Its own shame In spectacular ways An optical Incompatible With nudity Animals are blind —​ No spectacular shame . . . —​wattipāqaḥnāh ē’ynēy šnēyhem wayyēd’û kî ‘ēyrummim hēm (Gen. 3.7) And the eyes of them both were opened and they knew that they were naked.

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Genesis 2 is a vista open on human transcendental dimension. Because innocence is on trial here and now . . . It is how a second innocence looks like.7

Adam was an unusual animal in Eden, separate from the first. And God said, ‘Let us make a human in our image, by our likeness’ (Gen. 1.26). An animal separate from other animals, humanimal, a god-​animal like Enkidu, further separated by his rule. And then suddenly with the turn of a page the narrator draws us face-​to-​face with this confused creature. And the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone, I  shall make him a sustainer beside him.’ And the Lord God fashioned from the soil every beast of the field, and each fowl of the heavens and brought each to the human to see what he would call it; . . . and the human called names to all . . . but for the human no sustainer beside him was found. (Gen. 2.18–​20)

Derrida positions himself in this verse as the naked Adam, asking us also to look back at the animal that gazes at us. This animal does not know that it is waiting for a name. It does not know its difference. The cattle, the birds, the beasts and the cat. Derrida, in L’animal que donc je suis, reinscribes the

—​wayyōmer ‘adōnay ‘elōhîm lō-​tōb heyōt hā’ādām lebaddō. [Gen. 2.18–​20] And the Lord God said it is not good for the man to be alone. The film is torn between animality and humanity, between language and light, between the masculine and the feminine, and the memory of Genesis, the birth Eden’s law. Maria tears out of me my animality. I  feel myself in positions both separate and buried in its skin. My animal within, repressed. Father, law and word. The weight of the religious and philosophical fathers not lightened by the reinscription of their word, limned on the body of the horse. One moment I  am man, then next animal. Where is woman? I  listen for her voice. Why does she speak in French? This language is other to mine, and yet it evokes in me the sense that even my femininity is other to my mother tongue. The work resists the Propre of the superuncle tradition. The question of the animal becomes Feminine. L’animal, another place of difference, sexual difference and exclusion. I am drawn to a primal struggle. A  struggle for and against the other. M.O.:  They are already such ancient utterance and, when she formulates them, thought for such a long time that they represent a truth that is brilliant outside, extinguished inside.

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text, reinscribes Adam, and peering through his eyes asks us:

What happens in the film to us all, humans and animals, woman and man? In Maria’s poetic, filmic interrogation do we find another beginning, another Bible? Another Genesis? Another way of relating?

Since so long ago, can we say that the animal has been looking at us?8

M.O.: Enveloped in herself, turned toward and away from him; how could he see her? He must struggle against a thought that, as soon as he looks at it, looks at him.

At first Adam didn’t know who he was, or who he was following, writes Derrida. He was ‘naked, in silence’,9 caught in the gaze of these animals that come to him, before shame, before the calling of names. The time when Adam could be ‘naked as a beast’ and not know it. And the eyes of the two were opened, and they knew that they were naked. (Gen. 3.7)

Nudity is overwhelming in Derrida’s own text. He doesn’t hesitate to take us from Eden and transport us right into his bathroom in his home in Ris Orangis, giving us the cat’s eye view of him exiting the shower wearing nothing but his skin. Still I have been wanting to bring myself back to my nudity before the cat, since so long ago, since a previous time, in the Genesis tale, since the time with Adam, alias Ish, called out the animals’ names before the fall, still naked but before being ashamed of his nudity.10

Nudity and shame are foci for Derrida in order to understand his preconscious reflex of ‘startlement’ when encountering the cat in his own bathroom. This law that began in Genesis clearly rules Derrida. He can’t prevent himself, when out of his clothes, feeling the urge to cover himself before the

Maria’s question is set into a frame of memory and into the wake of the legacy of Marker’s film Sans Soleil. Her film, Dark Light, is a poetic and vocalized holding-​to-​account of Kant, then Nietzsche, Heidegger, Agamben, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, interrupted and undone by the voice of Elle (the mysterious voice-​figure in the film that is woman) and the images of horse, reminding the observer of the presence/​absence of woman and animal in the discourse. M.O.:  What he had never asked her was if she spoke the truth. This what explained the

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difficulty of their relations; she spoke the truth, gaze of the animal other, but not in what she said. that is, his cat. Not only does he feel a sense of shame, The truth is that the question of the animal raises but also he is ‘ashamed for the question of woman and that of sexual differbeing ashamed’.11 Derrida is ence. That this difference is gilded by discourses of ashamed of what? He pos- power, the unknown, the tyranny of language, the its whether it is his sense of memory of suffering and, more poignantly, the inability to truly love the other. being ‘naked as a beast’. But M.O.: She continued to speak with him, in him, this for him speaks of his ‘I would like you to love me only through that own momentary blindness. which is impassive and unfeeling in you.’ A  crack in the façade of his humanity:  ‘a lapsus, a fall, a The failure of love is captured in the scenes. Our failing, a fault, a symptom’, inability to language our love for the other. The silence and mystery of the horse. The veiling darkan ‘échéance’.12 The animal’s gaze is a mir- ness is a further barrier. The viewer gazes upon the spectacle. The abyss in between is unassailable. The ror reflecting back his own film is filled with the agony of waiting, waiting for shame thus he cannot truly a word in the gaping silence that signals the erased see the animal. He sees in primordial relation; an erasure of biblical proporthe mirror, only himself, his tions. An apocalyptic silence. shame, his shameful nudity. The façade of humanity slips. In that moment the animal itself is erased. Derrida makes the point that the animal is not naked, though Adam is. The animal regards the human as animal other. It is careless in its non-​ nudity. Adam’s shame is humanity made affective.13

And the eyes of the two were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves, and made themselves loincloths. (Gen. 3.7)

Derrida then underlines the notion of clothing as the first human invention but inventiveness in response to human shame. It is the first human attempt at technology, remarks Derrida. The making of an apron, loincloth, clothes or dress to cover oneself, one’s shame, one’s sex inscribed in scripture. This is extraordinarily in opposition, or other, to the animal that is sensible to neither modesty nor immodesty. Nudity and shame underline humanity’s self-​ knowledge.14 Humans thus are only able to conceptualize immodesty because of this fractured definition.

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It is as if in humanity’s apparel humanity clothes the truth of human being. We veil it. We veil our humanimalDark Light seems to work towards an anti-​Enkidu, ity behind clothes. A  kind of anti-​ Oedipus, anti-​ Adam performance of the aletheia, a work of veils, reveal- reawakening of human vision, restoring sight, or ing and concealing the truth of perhaps reminding the human of the inherent state the matter simultaneously. In of one’s blindness, revealing the gaping wound where inside of one is the animal. The animal, the concealing of our bodies that has been marginalized and obliterated by the we reveal them as humanimal: oedipal gaze, is glimpsed through shadow and in A veil is worn as a sign of mourning . . . she does her mourning for the veil.15

Yet clothing is merely symptomatic of this shame reaction. We are dumb and blind to the animal’s stark silence, our own humanity reflected in its gaze. We don’t see or hear the animal. The animal caught in our gaze never answers. The animal never answers to the philosophical question of the animal unassailably bound as it is by its silence and mystery. As the humanimal is veiled by its clothing. In asking the question the subject is unavoidably erased concedes Derrida. In applying the law we become blind. We are in the dark, captivated, as we hold the animal other captive and mute in our gaze. Where is the light here?

sombre threads of light. The gap between human and animal as other is revealed and in moments overcome. The animal is seen for the first time in its mysterious being and uncanny attitude. As Zepke notes in his response in Circuit, the horse becomes ‘impossibly real’. There is a moment of recognition of one’s own animality, which is a destabilizing movement in the work, where the human attains the capability to briefly overcome blindness and see. And for a moment, the human encounters the interior animal. M.O.: The gaze of a seer

Visionary Extra-​lucid blind one Blind Animals Blind to the proper Of the human L’animal is free. Perhaps this was the epiphany that Nietzsche awoke with his arms hung round the Turin horse. That he had never been free. His paradise was always already lost. Paradise was irretrievable the moment his blind eyes opened, when he became a seer. He was lucid in his sudden myopia. He hadn’t known that he had lost it. In the grips of the film, I am Nietzsche, and I cannot bear that a cart-​horse is being beaten. I  am Enkidu and I  return, long haired, and naked to the gazelles. I  am Adam and I  throw away all the names.

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Light of the dark? What does that mean? We wonder about this before opening the work. Then while looking at it, thus while reading it, we wonder about it again, after the fact. And the question resonates in the very body of the images, right on the captive body of these images.16

Something is at stake in this question, and this questioning of Genesis. Derrida believes it is nothing less than life and death: It is the dizziness I feel before the abyss opened by this stupid ruse . . . whenever I  run away from the animal that looks at me naked. I  often wonder whether this vertigo before the abyss of such an ‘in order to see’ deep in the eyes of God is not the same as that which takes hold of me when I feel so naked in front of a cat, facing it, and when, meeting its gaze, I hear the cat or God ask itself, ask me: Is he going to call me, is he going to address me? What name is he going to call me by, this naked man, before I give him woman, before I lend her to him in giving her to him, before I give her to him or before he gives her to himself by taking it upon himself, from under him, from at his side [à ses côtés]? Or even from his rib [de sa côte]?17

It is this vertigo that afflicts the reader, the sudden awareness of the abyss, the sudden vulnerability or exposure, the pregnant, poignant silence of the animal that fair rages, brutalizes and batters at this peculiarly human blindness. The work intensifies that glimpse of grief and loss until we are led to ask like Derrida, ‘Who was born first, before the names?’18 For Derrida, the poetic is the only way to think the animal, the only way to take on the ‘address’ of the animal, and even then not fully, and not before the designation ‘human’ obscures the gaze. For thinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing, derives from poetry.19

Hence this is the value of Cixous’s poetic bestiary. In Irving Goh’s essay ‘The Passion according to Cixous’, he finds themes in Cixous’s creative and theoretical work as a resistance to and a reinscribing of Genesis’s (and the Bible’s) overshadowing of the animal.20 Goh describes Cixous’s project as a writing of an ‘other’ Bible. In this Bible, the text of Genesis, as in Derrida’s reading, is deconstructed via a poetic route. The texts are imbued with écriture féminine, that is, reconstructed in the feminine, right on the edge of the imaginary,

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where what is shared in the mysterious experience of animal, as it is in female otherness, comes to the fore. In this reading as in Derrida’s, the animal is seen to escape shame in nakedness which is Genesis’s human experience of ‘death-​ by-​knowledge’.21 In doing so, the animal escapes the law, and while the animal follows the human from the garden, it is never banished. For Goh, this phenomenon centres on human vision, eyes opened, a godly gaze that at the same time is blinded. The animal is free from such a paradox and is free to live intensely; a freedom that is not synonymous with human being. Cixous’s texts on the animot seek to jettison the oedipal condition and aspire, albeit fleetingly, to enter the animal point of view via the poetic. The juxtaposition of blindness and separation from animality is inscribed in poetry in The Epic of Gilgamesh, where Enkidu, creation of the goddess, enters human civilization via sexual awakening and in doing so loses his animal innocence and what remained of his divinity. When with her delights he was fully sated, He turned his gaze to his herd, The gazelles saw Enkidu, they started to run, The beasts of the field shied away from his presence.22

The separation that the humanimal Enkidu experiences at the finality of his exit from this Mesopotamian Paradise is a work of mourning. Blindness is equated with loss and grief. In other words, as long as the human sees, every living moment is a work of mourning with regard to that death by knowledge.23

This is what Maria O’Connor has achieved in her film essay, ‘Ecce Equus or, ‘Dark Light’. The many leaps and escapes between text, sound and image undo the viewer’s animal blindness, unveiling one’s own anthropocentrism, deconstructing implicit mastery. Through the juxtaposition of image and text she untethers the viewer so they might enter into a place where thinking the animal might begin, as Derrida does in his reinscription of the text of Genesis. But importantly, O’Connor engages subtly and compellingly with the world’s invisible violence against the animal. Her film invokes, for this viewer, Derrida’s own compassion in L’animal que donc je suis –​grief tempered by hope, passion vying with despair, and his willingness to embrace the vertigo of berēšît.

Goh sees the same work of mourning as the force that blinds after The Fall of Man while at the same time humans are given sight.24 The Fall of Man is a work of vision. Cixous plays on this paradoxical Edenic veiling and unveiling of sight in her essay ‘Savoir’.

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Myopia would not grow again, the foreigner would never come back to her, her myopia, so strong –​a force she had always called weakness and infirmity. But now its force, its strange force, was revealed to her, retrospectively at the very moment it was taken away from her.25

In Cixous’s own writing she hopes to unveil the excluded animal as Derrida describes in L’animal que donc je suis, to be ‘seen seen’ by the animal,26 to take account of human visibility, to invite animots (animal-​words) into the realm of text, to give them spirit, and consciousness, and reason, and voice. The cat is one of her favourite animal muses, and chat-​mots (cat-​words) enter her text like magic lanterns. For her they mediate between art and language, image and text, they return her sight to her, allowing her to become humanimal; that is, to attain or return to her ‘humanimality’, to recover her ‘myopia’ that conversely allows her to see what has been erased. Derrida’s illumination of the animalesque in the poetic text of Genesis provides this same move, a conduit, movement between text and image, between the animal, human and God, a return to paradise, a new way to think. The animal looks at us and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins here.27

Figure 11.1  Still from Maria O’Connor’s film Equus’ Ashes, 2014; also exhibited as a film installation Ecce Equus at St Paul St Gallery, Auckland.

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Figure 11.2  Still from Maria O’Connor’s film Equus’ Ashes, 2014; also exhibited as a film installation Ecce Equus at St Paul St Gallery, Auckland.

Notes 1. All translations of Genesis follow Robert Alter, Genesis (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996). 2. Tablet 1/​101–​2, The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. Andrew George (London: Penguin, 1999), 5. 3. Tablet 1/​105–​12, The Epic of Gilgamesh, 5. 4. André LaCocque, The Trial of Innocence: Adam, Eve, and the Yahwist (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2006), 128. 5. Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 104. 6. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 20–​1. 7. LaCocque, The Trial of Innocence, 25. 8. Derrida, The Animal, 3. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 4. 12. Ibid. 13. Suzanne Guerlac, ‘Derrida and His Cat: The Most Important Question’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 16, no. 5 (2012): 696. 14. Derrida, The Animal, 5.

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15. Jacques Derrida, ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’, in Veils, ed. Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 49–​50. 16. Jacques Derrida, ‘Aletheia’, Oxford Literary Review 32, no. 2 (2010): 169. 17. Derrida, The Animal, 17–​18. 18. Ibid., 18. 19. Ibid., 7. 20. Irving Goh, ‘The Passion according to Cixous: From Human Blindness to Animots’, MLN 125 (2010): 1050–​74. 21. Ibid., 1053. 22. Tablet 1/​195–​8, The Epic of Gilgamesh, 8. 23. Goh, ‘The Passion’, 1053. 24. Ibid., 1055. 25. Hélène Cixous, ‘Savoir’, in Cixous and Derrida, Veils, 16; italics in the original. 26. Derrida, The Animal, 13. 27. Ibid., 29.

Bibliography Alter, Robert. Genesis. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996. Calarco, Matthew. ‘On the Borders of Language and Death: Derrida and the Question of the Animal’. Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 7, no. 2 (2002): 17–​25. Calarco, Matthew. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Cixous, Hélène. Stigmata: Escaping Texts. London: Routledge, 1998. Cixous, Hélène, and Jacques Derrida. Veils. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Derrida Jacques. ‘Aletheia’. Oxford Literary Review 32, no. 2 (2010): 169–​88. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Garnier, Marie-​Dominique. ‘Animal Writes: Derrida’s Que Donc and Other Tails’. Critical Studies 35 (2011): 23–​40. George, Andrew (ed.). The Epic of Gilgamesh. London: Penguin, 1999. Goh, Irving. ‘Blindness and Animality, or Learning to Live Finally in Clarice Lispector’s The Passion according to G.H’. A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 25 (2012): 113–​36. Goh, Irving. ‘The Passion according to Cixous: From Human Blindness to Animots’. MLN 125 (2010): 105–​74.

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Guerlac, Suzanne. ‘Derrida and His Cat: The Most Important Question’. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 16, no. 5 (2012): 695–​702. Hanrahan, Mairéad. ‘Countersigning Painting’. The European Legacy 14 (2009): 5–​17. LaCocque, André. The Trial of Innocence: Adam, Eve, and the Yahwist. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2006. Moore, Stephen (ed.). Divinanimality. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Naas, Michael. ‘Derrida’s Flair (for the Animals to Follow. . .)’. Research in Phenomenology 40 (2010): 219–​42. O’Connor, Maria. ‘Dark Light. (2014)’. Circuit: Artist Film & Video New Zealand. Accessed 1 February 2016. Available online: http://​www.circuit.org.nz/​film/​ dark-​light. O’Connor, Maria. ‘Equus’ Ashes: Dark Light’ (screenplay, working title). Auckland: Dark Horse Ltd, 2013. Slater, Michelle. ‘Rethinking Human-​Animal Ontological Differences: Derrida’s “Animot” and Cixous’ “Fips”’. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 16 (2012): 685–​93. Turner, Lyn (ed.). The Animal in Deconstruction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Zepke, Stephen. ‘A Response to Maria O’Connor’s Dark Light’. Circuit blog. Accessed 17 February 2016. Available online: http://​circuit.org.nz/​blog/​ dark-​light-​a-​response-​by-​stephen-​zepke.

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Of Birth and Death Hearing and Seeing Then and Now Elaine M. Wainwright

This chapter had its origin in an invitation to present a keynote address at the 2015 Oceania Biblical Studies Association (OBSA) meeting in Samoa. The question raised for presenters was: what may people who study the Bible in Oceania learn from the speakers and writers of our seas? In the presentation itself and in this publication, I acknowledge those speakers and writers and their relationship with the land and/​or the seas that are their native homes. Among them are the ancient custodians of land and sea as well as the more newly arrived to our islands. The question in the invitation is multilayered and informs the focus I want to take up. The phrase ‘people who study the Bible in Oceania’ turns attention to a book, a text that is ancient –​for the New Testament scholar, this text belongs to the first century of the Common Era. The New Testament segment of the Bible was born in a place very distant from Oceania, namely, in the lands of diaspora Judaism and at a very different time –​the first century ce. Traces of those lands and the people of the narrative remain encoded in the text. This book came late to Oceania, at the end of the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, and it came with the colonizers; as Roberta Sykes, an indigenous Australian poet, captures in her poem ‘Rachel’, it came ‘with . . . beads and mirrors’, together with the other typical accompaniments of colonialism.1 This Bible has been interpreted predominantly by ‘speakers and writers’ of these seas, but it has also been interpreted by artists who speak and write in a visual medium. Also, poets and novelists speak our seas and also our lands not only through words

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but the spaces between them. Being of Australian origin, I  am particularly aware that it is the land more than the sea that is so often spoken by indigenous and other Australian artists, and that will be the focus in this chapter. I have entitled this chapter ‘Of Birth and Death: Hearing and Seeing Then and Now’. Two key images of profound materiality, one of birth and one of death, will engage our senses as this chapter unfolds. Seeing opens into hearing as each of the two focal artists accompanies their image with poetic and reflective words. These, in their turn, will resonate with the words of the Matthean storyteller who touches on life and on death at the beginning and end of the gospel narrative. The words of Australian Aboriginal artist George Mung Mung, speaking of his sculpture Mary of Warmun, and of Arthur Boyd on his Crucifixion Shoalhaven will echo with those of a small group of Australian poets. I propose to move seamlessly from image to poetic word to gospel narrative in a spiral fashion that has neither beginning nor end. Following the curves of the spiral, I will explore the way that attending to image and word engaged by the senses can enable a material reading of the Matthean narrative, a reading responsive to this age of ecological imperatives. As this journey begins, I establish first my theoretical framework.

A reading prism I situate what I am calling a ‘material reading’2 within the context of an ecological reading process that seeks an ethical approach to reading biblical texts in the face of current ecological crises. It is a reading that gives attention to ‘habitat’ in all its materiality/​materialities as that intricate web in which other-​than-​ human actants participate with the human and the holy in their particularity and materiality. Such readings will be of the biblical text, of art and of poetry and the ways they and their materiality intertwine in the interpretive process. Such multiple engagement is named intertextuality in literary and biblical studies. The intertextuality that will inform this chapter is that of contemporary artists and poets whose works engage intertextually with the Matthean text, the biblical text in focus here. According to J. W. Voelz, attending to such intertextuality evokes new readings and new writings ‘in the presence of the interpreter’.3 R. Nägele expands this a little more claiming that

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a reading that does not merely follow the ‘nicely woven’ texture of the texts but instead takes into account the cuts, the loose and frazzled threads, will enter a space between the texts, where other texts and textures are woven in the intermingling of texts and languages. There we might begin to read that which has never been written.4

In considering such intertextuality, Anne Elvey draws attention to the materiality of the text itself: its availability to us and to our interpretation by way of paper pulp should we have a Bible in hand; by way of plastic or leather which covers microchips and other electronic matter should we be engaging the text on a laptop or I-​pad. The texts of the intertextual speakers and writers of our seas and lands also contribute to an intertextual reading of the materiality of the text: paint on wood or canvas, texts on paper and many other media.5

Of birth: Hearing and seeing then and now She was found to be with child . . . and there is a moment, a gasp in the Matthean storytelling community. So much plays within that moment. It can, however, be swept away too quickly if the reader runs to the final phrase –​by or out of a spirit that is holy (Mt. 1.18). And as we imagine that Matthean community, possibly a Pharisaic community in Sepphoris or nearby,6 we might hear in that space, that swept away moment, first-​century echoes of the words of Jane Schaberg: the endangered woman and child!7 The Matthean genealogist has already broken the thirty-​nine-​times chanted pattern: male was the father of male. The most jarring break for listeners is this: Jacob the father of Joseph, husband of Mary, from whom Jesus was born. Joseph, ‘husband of Mary’, not Mary, ‘wife of Joseph’ is what listeners would expect. And the text goes on –​it is of her/​Mary that Jesus is born, not of him (not ‘male was the father of male’/​ Joseph was the father of Jesus). And then that pause on the air: she was found to be with child . . . the community’s storyteller catches her breath and continues . . . by a spirit that is holy. And should any have missed these words, the storyteller reiterates almost immediately: the child conceived in her is of/​from a spirit that is holy (1.20). Mary is with child in her womb –​en gastri. This is a profound bodily experience. Anne Elvey says of this experience that the birth of the child (even en

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gastri) is the birth of the mother. The mother and the child are born in and through their interconnectedness with/​in the materiality of the pregnant body. It is here that the spirit is present.8 George Mung Mung, a traditional Warmun Aboriginal elder, has captured this materiality in his wooden sculpture Mary of Warmun (or ‘the pregnant Mary’ as it is sometimes called) (Figure 12.1). According to Rosemary Crumlin, ‘The figure is that of a young, unmarried Warmun girl. Her body is painted with the traditional designs. She is pregnant and carries the child in her womb-​shield beneath her heart. The unborn is already a man who dances within her in the womb [en gastri].’9 Mary of Warmun was carved by George Mung Mung from the bough of a tree he found deep in the Bungle Bungle ranges of Western Australia. It is of Earth, and it is of his ‘country’. It speaks the birth of the child and of his mother not only in his image but also in his words that accompany the image:

Figure 12.1  George Mung Mung, Mary of Warmun, 1983.

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This young woman She’s a young woman, this one. The spirit of the little baby Comes in a dream To his mother.10

His friend and fellow-​elder, Hector Sundaloo (Jandany), the Ngapuny man of the Warmun people, said of George Mung Mung: He was looking forward to a blackfella way And a Kartiya (Whitefellas) way He was a two-​way man.11

Viewers can see and can hear by way of those two powerful senses/​by way of image and word, that George Mung Mung has indeed gone down deep into his aboriginal roots, bringing alive that bough of the tree in a new way, perhaps the way of the ‘material sacred’ as Kate Rigby suggests.12 He has also gone down deep into the tradition/​the Christian narrative of Mary with the child en gastri. Is there also a catching of breath, however, for those who see that the young woman bears the traditional designs of an unmarried Warmun girl and that Mung Mung emphasizes that this child is ‘proper little one’: Proper little one His mother says.13

Do we hear echoes of what Jane Schaberg and the Matthean narrator respond to in different ways: the mother together with her child is endangered, endangered by the law? That space of the drawing in of breath in the Matthean community’s theologizing; that question that the indrawn breath raised for Schaberg –​what does it mean to be with child before they came to live together? And for George Mung Mung, why the emphasis on ‘proper little one’ and why the markings of the unmarried woman? A question, an uncertainty, a space in which new meaning can be made hangs in the air, hangs around the materiality of flesh in image and word, and the sociality that accompanies the material: ‘with child’, ‘proper little one’. We have begun to see what Nägele theorized, namely, an intertextuality whereby the ‘loose and frazzled threads enter a space between the texts, where other texts and textures are woven in the intermingling of texts and

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languages’.14 He goes on to say that ‘there we might begin to read that which has never been written’. And as the ecocritic turns back to the Matthean text she or he engages a different type of intertext, one woven out of the fabric of an Isaian text (7.14) so that its resonances sound in the Matthean storytelling: Look, the young woman [virgin] will conceive and bear a son; And they shall name him Emmanuel [a name which means ‘God is with us’]. (Mt. 1.23)

In the endangered woman and child, the young woman/​virgin pregnant before she came to live with Joseph, God/​the holy is with us/​the Earth community. Habitat, human and holy come together and explode into new meaning for the ecological reader engaging with text and the tradition which is threaded around and into it. In the child in the womb/​en gastri, in all its materiality, God/​the holy one is with the Earth community. Such a reading may again be close to that which Kate Rigby seeks to speak, ‘[a]‌new way[s] of reading earlier texts, which respond to the . . . experience of the material sacred in the written word’.15 George Mung Mung provides another way of access to the material sacred, to the with-​us-​ness of the holy, namely, through his art and his words. The materiality of the child is visible in Mary’s womb in a way that differs from most depictions of Mary with child –​they generally do not depict Mary as pregnant at all so that this image is an exception and may surprise the viewer. George Mung Mung’s speaking of the material sacred is also evident in his words: He says, Mother, I’m ready now And the old women take her away And the little one is born Down in the river here.16

The imagined Matthean community, the Warmun people of the Bungle Bungle region and we, contemporary people of Oceania, have heard and seen word and image; in the endangered woman and child, the holy is present, in human flesh which, in its turn, has a rich material habitat. In this way, habitat, human and holy are inseparable. This insight, however, is not limited to a contemporary ecological reading of the biblical text. Rather, through the

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wood and paint of Mary of Warmun and the poetic words of George Mung Mung which accompany his sculpture, encounter with the material sacred can take place.

Of death: Hearing and seeing then and now As we move from a seeing and a hearing of birth to a seeing and hearing of death, the Australian poet Kevin Hart in his poem Facing the Pacific at Night can catch up Oceanic listeners/​readers into the ‘elemental life’, the ‘revealing of the thing itself ’, as one stands before that vast Ocean. Such an experience leads him to conclude that it is ‘as though you had just died to birth and death –​no name to hide behind’.17 Hart gives us pause in the task of learning from those who speak and write our seas and their lands. He reminds us of the ease with which we speak of birth and of death. For the Matthean scholar, they  –​birth and death –​frame the Matthean story of Jesus. Hart’s words can fill our pause. His standing ‘on the cliff ’ before the great ocean was ‘as though you had just died to birth and death’. The earlier engagement in this article with Mary of Warmun invited viewers to ‘die to’ some long-​held interpretations of the birth of Jesus and to engage with that birth anew. A similar experience may accompany a turn here to and beyond the death of Jesus. The speaker of our lands and seas, in this turn, is Australian artist Arthur Boyd and his oil on canvas entitled Crucifixion, Shoalhaven (Figure 12.2). His image might hear us catching our breath as we imagined earlier of the Matthean community and their encounter with the opening verses of the birth narrative in their gospel. Rosemary Crumlin says of Crucifixion, Shoalhaven that it ‘startle(s) so much because of the juxtaposition of the crucifix, Christianity’s most power symbol, against the Australian landscape’.18 Shoalhaven is in the south-​eastern region of New South Wales, and the viewer encounters the cross not on a lonely hill, with which viewers are familiar, but in the Shoalhaven river against a typical Australian bush landscape and clear sky. The audible catching of breath, however, may accompany the viewer’s recognition that the figure on the cruciform is female. Here, Boyd’s words are significant:

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Figure  12.2  Arthur Boyd, Crucifixion, Shoalhaven, 1979–​ 80. Bundanon Trust Collection.

I do not believe it is enough to say he represented us. I do not wish to separate the idea of suffering by allowing just the male to be seen. There has been an awakening consciousness of the potential and force of women in our time.19

And, one could add, an awakening consciousness that women suffer profoundly in ways that often differ from the sufferings of men and rarely find their way into theological discussions. If we take account, however, of the ‘material sacred’ which has woven like a thread through this chapter, what the viewer sees is the material body of a woman tied to that most powerful symbol of Christianity as Crumlin noted earlier. It functions, as do many forms of art, in what Timothy Morton calls the ‘liminal space between things’,20 outside time as Kevin Hart suggests, when one has just died ‘to birth and death’.

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I was lured into that ‘liminal space between things’ recently as I  sought a way to read the Matthean passion narrative ecocritically/​ecologically. As in this chapter, intertextuality came to my aid as I  engaged with Manuel Villalobos Mendoza’s reading of the abject body of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark.21 Mendoza too works intertextually, in this instance with Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject as that which disturbs, crosses boundaries, fails to respect order and border –​this is what Mendoza reads in Mark’s passion narrative. Boyd’s placing of a woman on the cruciform renders the crucifixion more abject: it disturbs, crosses boundaries, fails to respect order and limits. I propose to demonstrate this as I bring into dialogue my ecocritical reading of the Matthean death of Jesus and Arthur Boyd’s Shoalhaven Crucifixion. As the ecological reader follows the Matthean narrative of the death of Jesus, it can evoke not just the abjection of Jesus but of all Earth’s other-​than-​human as well as human constituents who suffer and endure such abjection today at the hands of others, most predominantly from human others and powerful coalitions among them. This is evocative likewise in Shoalhaven Crucifixion as the crucified female body is backed by the water of the river and the complex ecosystem of land and trees. Such a death is not just of the human body but Earth’s others are caught up in it. If we take up the Matthean narrative at 27.26, we hear the words: ‘After flogging Jesus, he handed him over to be crucified.’ It is easy for readers to miss the space between the flogging and crucifixion. The soldiers take Jesus before the whole cohort. They strip him naked twice (vv.28 and 31), exposing him, exposing his flagellated body to their gaze, a more profound dishonouring than the flogging. Whatever violence may have been perpetrated on the naked body of Jesus as it was twice stripped is passed over by the Matthean narrator. It remains in that liminal space, the space between. The mocking of Jesus does not stop with the cohort; it continues on the road to the place of crucifixion and beyond. Even while Jesus is suspended naked on the cross awaiting death, his exposure to the penetrating gaze of all bystanders is not sufficient for the chief priests, scribes and elders. They continue to degrade Jesus using his own teachings against him (27.42–​3). Even two bandits crucified with him join in the taunts (27.44). The final abjecting of the body of Jesus in its sociality and materiality is reached at Golgotha, the Place of the Skull, and goes beyond even Jesus’ last breath in 27.50.

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In the space between the Matthean narrative and the Shoalhaven image, abjection of the female body is evoked. Viewers are drawn into the myriad ways in which the naked female body is abused in places and spaces around our world: as women are raped multiple times, as they join the thousands of refugees seeking safety, as they are among people on the move around our Earth, as they are trafficked along similar routes to those of the refugees, as they are sold into slavery or worked until their body can take no more –​as it was for Jesus on Golgotha. The words of Boyd echo again: I do not wish to separate the idea of suffering by allowing just the male to be seen. The ecocritical reader will be attentive not only to the gendered space between male and female but also to other materialities touching death. The very cosmos itself is caught up in Jesus’ final moments as darkness covers pasan tēn gēn/​all the earth/​Earth from noon until three (27.45). It is as if Earth mourns the profound and absolute abjection of Jesus and carries this across time to catch up all who suffer, both male and female. The cry of Jesus concludes the relentless process of degradation/​abjection –​my God, my God why have you (the Holy One) abandoned me?22 This can be the cry of all who suffer today, both male and female, gendered humanity but also all the more-​ than-​human constituents of Earth, all inhabitants of every habitat that is being degraded, abjected at this time, as was the body of Jesus. Why have you abandoned me? Why leave me/​leave us to those who strip bare the Earth, penetrate its core and all its corners, ravaging its clothes, dividing them as spoils, abjecting it in myriads of ways until finally bringing it to the moment of death? Why have you abandoned this Jesus on the cross, this woman on the cross, this Earth upon a cross?

Such a cry is powerful and it is repeated:  Jesus again cries out in a loud voice and gives over/​gives up his last breath, his spirit (pneuma) (27.50). The Emmanuel, the one in whom G*d was/​is with the Earth community (Mt. 1.23) enters not only into life in human flesh (1.18–​23) but also into another material process of the life-​cycle: death. Donna Haraway’s reflection on the death of her father may provide us with a short but significant intertext here. She distinguishes between ‘body’ and ‘corpse’ and says that at death, the body is no longer there –​‘that body which is always in-​the-​making; it is always a

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vital entanglement of heterogeneous scales, times, and kinds of being webbed into fleshly presence, always a becoming, always constituted in relating’.23 But at death, only the corpse remains. She goes on to say that ‘[m]‌y father is undone and that is why I must remember him. I and all those who lived entangled with him become his flesh; we are kin to the dead because their bodies have touched us’.24 At this point in the unfolding Matthean narrative of the death of Jesus, it seems that it is only the corpse that remains, as it is on the Shoalhaven crucifix. Elizabeth Johnson adds to the import of this when she says, ‘No exception to perhaps the only ironclad rule in all of nature, Jesus died, his life ending in a spasm of state-​sponsored violence.’25 Habitat, human and holy remain profoundly entangled as the final stages of the narrative unfold around the abjecting of Jesus’ dead body on the wooden beams of state torture, the torture of flesh/​of materiality. Time almost stands still around this profound entanglement. It would be easy to rush on to speak of resurrection, but I do not want to do that. I want us to stay with Mt. 27.50: he yielded up his spirit. The one in whom the holy is with the entire Earth community will be laid in the earth, and the many crucified women of our day will share in this fate. Shoalhaven Crucifixion, the work, the word of one who speaks our land and our shores does not give the woman voice. But there is another voice that speaks lament, not so much in words but in a ‘wail for the dead’. It is Oodgeroo Noonuccal, whom some may know as Kath Walker, who proffers her writing as an alternative to the Bible. She is an indigenous Australian poet, Stradbroke Island off the coast of Brisbane/​Minjerribah being her country and Noonuccal her tribe. As we listen to her words, we might imagine the crucified body of an indigenous woman on the cross against the backdrop of her country: ‘Remember the dead, cry for them.’26 Lament enables what Stacy Alaimo calls ‘work to reveal and reshape the flows of material agencies across regions, environments, animal bodies, and human bodies’.27 Oodgeroo’s evoking of the flows of cosmic forces, the wail rising up from human bodies and the remembering of the dead could overwhelm, but there is a ‘catching of the breath’ and Oodgeroo concludes ‘then it is over, life now’ as the poem concludes. And that life, like the remembering of the dead, reshapes the flows of material agencies.

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Conclusion Kate Rigby suggests that ‘material ecocriticism . . . might give rise to . . . new ways of reading earlier texts which respond to the . . . experience of the material sacred in the written word’.28 I have sought to demonstrate in this chapter that such ecocriticism of biblical texts can be well served by an engagement with the speakers and writers of our seas whose contemporary art in myriad forms function intertextually with both biblical texts and contemporary ecocriticism. It became clear that there is neither a clear beginning nor a clear end for such intertextual dialogue. Rather, the entry point can shift from biblical text, to image or carving or to current ecological exigencies and theories. The interpreter needs to be alert to what is required of one’s senses, especially seeing and hearing, as the eye or ear moves from the cry of the Earth, to text, to colour on wood and canvas. There is already a materiality in the reading process, and dialogue with ecocritics such as Rigby, Morton and Alaimo provide some directions or indicators of the way forward even if not the surety of a map. It has emerged that there is often a catching of the breath or a hair’s breadth between ‘reading what is written’ and what has ‘never been written’, reading the space that the image and the word create. To read the biblical text and its more current evocations in word and image is to make meaning anew. Today, the voices of those of us who interpret the biblical text in our lands, in our islands, can join with the many who speak and imagine our islands anew as together we face one of our greatest challenges: awareness of and ethical response to the claim of the ‘material sacred’ in Oceania.

Notes 1. Roberta Sykes, ‘Rachel’, in Love Poems and Other Revolutionary Actions (Brisbane: University of Queensland, 1988), accessible online http://​www. poetrylibrary.edu.au/​poets/​sykes-​roberta/​rachel-​0554003. 2. For an extensive exploration of such reading, see Material Ecocriticism, ed. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2014).

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3. J. W. Voelz, ‘Multiple Signs and Double Texts: Elements of Intertextuality’, in Intertextuality in Biblical Writings, ed. S. Draisma (Kok: Kampen, 1989), 27–​34. 4. R. Nägele, Echoes of Translation: Reading between Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 16. 5. Anne Elvey, ‘The Matter of Texts: A Material Intertextuality and Ecocritical Engagements with the Bible’, in Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches, ed. A. Goodbody and K. Rigby (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 181–​93. 6. Anders Runesson, ‘Rethinking Early Jewish-​Christian Relations: Matthean Community History as Pharisaic Intragroup Conflict’, JBL 127, no. 1 (2008): 95–​132. 7. Jane Schaberg, The Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Theological Interpretation of the Infancy Narratives (San Francisco: Harper & Row; 1987), 42–​62. 8. Anne Elvey, An Ecological Feminist Reading of the Gospel of Luke: A Gestational Paradigm, Studies in Women and Religion 45 (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2005), 111–​42. 9. Rosemary Crumlin, ‘Out of an Ancient Culture Comes the Mother’, in Beyond Belief: Modern Art and the Religious Imagination, ed. Rosemary Crumlin (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1998), 128. 10. George Mung Mung, cited in ibid., 128. 11. Hector Sundaloo (Jandamy) in Crumlin, ‘Out of an Ancient Culture’, 128. 12. Kate Rigby, ‘Spirits That Matter: Pathways toward a Rematerialization of Religion and Spirituality’, in Iovino and Oppermann (eds.), Material Ecocriticism, 287. 13. George Mung Mung, cited in Crumlin, ‘Out of an Ancient Culture’, 128. 14. Nägele, Echoes of Translation, 16. 15. Rigby, ‘Spirits That Matter’, 287. 16. Mung Mung, cited by Rosemary Crumlin, ‘Out of an Ancient Culture’, 128. 17. Kevin Hart, ‘Facing the Pacific at Night’ in The Oxford Book of Australian Religious Verse, ed. Kevin Hart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 91. 18. Rosemary Crumlin, ‘Arthur Boyd, Crucifixion Shoalhaven’, in Images of Religion in Australian Art, ed. Rosemary Crumlin (Kensington: Bay Books, 1988), 158. 19. Rosemary Crumlin, ‘Interview with Author, Suffolk, 3 September 1987’, cited in ibid., 158; original emphasis. 20. Timothy Morton, ‘The Liminal Space between Things: Epiphany and the Physical’, cited in Stacy Alaimo, ‘Oceanic Origins, Plastic Activism, and New Materialism at Sea’, in Material Ecocriticism, ed. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 269.

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21. M. V. Mendoza, Abject Bodies in the Gospel of Mark, The Bible in the Modern World 45 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2012). 22. As is well known, these words on the lips of Jesus evoke the cry of the innocent suffering one of Psalm 22 and hence can also evoke the cry of the innocent and suffering Earth. 23. Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet, Posthumanities 3 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 163. 24. Ibid. 25. See Elizabeth Johnson, ‘An Earthy Christology’, America, 13 April 2009, available online: http://​americamagazine.org/​issue/​693/​article/​ earthy-​christology. 26. Oodgeroo Noonuccal, ‘Dawn Wail for the Dead’, in Aboriginal Culture Today, ed. Anna Rutherford (Kunapipi: Dangeroo Press, 1988), 33. 27. Alaimo, ‘Oceanic Origins’, 187. 28. Rigby, ‘Spirits That Matter’, 287.

Bibliography Alaimo, Stacy. ‘Oceanic Origins, Plastic Activism, and New Materialism at Sea’. In Material Ecocriticism, edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, 186–​ 203. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Crumlin, Rosemary. ‘Arthur Boyd, Crucifixion Shoalhaven’. In Images of Religion in Australian Art, edited by Rosemary Crumlin, 158. Kensington: Bay Books, 1988. Crumlin, Rosemary (ed.). Beyond Belief: Modern Art and the Religious Imagination. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1998. Crumlin, Rosemary (ed.). Images of Religion in Australian Art. Kensington: Bay Books, 1988. Crumlin, Rosemary. ‘Out of an Ancient Culture Comes the Mother’. In Beyond Belief: Modern Art and the Religious Imagination, edited by Rosemary Crumlin, 128. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1998. Elvey, Anne. An Ecological Feminist Reading of the Gospel of Luke: A Gestational Paradigm. Studies in Women and Religion 45. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2005. Elvey, Anne. ‘The Matter of Texts: A Material Intertextuality and Ecocritical Engagements with the Bible’. In Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches, edited by A. Goodbody and K. Rigby, 181–​93. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Posthumanities 3. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

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Hart, Kevin. ‘Facing the Pacific at Night’. In The Oxford Book of Australian Religious Verse, edited by Kevin Hart, 91. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann (eds.). Material Ecocriticism. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2014. Johnson, Elizabeth. ‘An Earthy Christology’. America, 13 April 2009. Available online: http://​americamagazine.org/​issue/​693/​article/​earthy-​christology. Mendoza, M. V. Abject Bodies in the Gospel of Mark. The Bible in the Modern World 45. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2012. Nägele, R. Echoes of Translation: Reading between Texts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Noonuccal, Oodgeroo. ‘Dawn Wail for the Dead’. In Aboriginal Culture Today, edited by Anna Rutherford, 18. Kunapipi: Dangeroo Press, 1988. Rigby, Kate. ‘Spirits That Matter: Pathways toward a Rematerialization of Religion and Spirituality’. In Iovino and Oppermann (eds.), Material Ecocriticism, 283–​90. Runesson, Anders. ‘Rethinking Early Jewish-​Christian Relations: Matthean Community History as Pharisaic Intragroup Conflic’. JBL 127, no. 1 (2008): 95–​132. Schaberg, Jane. The Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Theological Interpretation of the Infancy Narratives. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987. Sykes, Roberta. ‘Rachel’. In Love Poems and Other Revolutionary Actions. Brisbane: University of Queensland, 1988. Available online: http://​www. poetrylibrary.edu.au/​poets/​sykes-​roberta/​rachel-​0554003. Voelz, J. W. ‘Multiple Signs and Double Texts: Elements of Intertextuality’. In Intertextuality in Biblical Writings, edited by S. Draisma, 27–​34. Kok: Kampen, 1989.

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Is This the Place? The Promised Land in Colin McCahon’s Paintings Judith Brown

In 1972, the New Zealand artist Colin McCahon (1919–​87)1 painted a landscape titled Takaka:  Night and Day (1948). Takaka, in Golden Bay, Nelson, was an unsurveyed settlement that grew in the 1880s out of farming and timber industries. When discussing this painting, McCahon noted: It states my interest in landscape as a symbol of place and also of the human condition. It is not so much a portrait of a place as such but is a memory of a time and an experience of a particular place.2

Takaka: Night and Day captures two of the artist’s greatest qualities: first, an intense awareness of the ambiguity of habitation beyond mere material relationship; and second, a search for an essence of the landscape, a seeing beyond cultural conditioning.3 In McCahon’s art, we find one answer to the question: ‘What is the meaning of land?’ Our sense of place is about encounter, perception and interpretation; there is, however, always a difference between, on the one hand, humanly significant meaning arising from encountering the land and, on the other, the qualities that the land possesses in itself. We often overlay what is in front of us with values and significance that arise from preconceived ways of seeing. In this chapter, Colin McCahon’s art is brought into dialogue with the biblical concept of a Promised Land, with which he engages in the New Zealand context of European settlement.4 McCahon’s relationship to this biblical concept and to its particular New Zealand expression was informed, subtle and

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deeply critical. This relationship will be explored in selected examples of McCahon’s art as both a pictorial presentation of landscape and the symbolic freighting of the land through the motif of the Promised Land.

Reflections on the Promised Land in Scripture The relationship of God’s people to a Promised Land begins in the Bible with a summons to Abraham, a call to landlessness and wandering in response to a divine promise of blessing (Gen. 12.1–​9). This land is not the essence of Israel’s relationship with YHWH5 but is always experienced within that relationship. As a promise, it is rooted in the patriarchal and covenantal history of Abraham with YHWH, yet the people never possess nor sovereignly attain it apart from the gifting of YHWH. The whole earth is said to belong to YHWH (e.g. Exod. 9.29; Deut. 10.14; Ps. 24.1; Job 41.11; 1 Cor. 10.26), yet the people forget this, mistreating the land as though it belonged to them and committing social and religious atrocities therein (Ps. 106.24–​39). This is a marked contrast to the liberty and joy anticipated so lyrically for the Promised Land in passages such as Deut. 11.10–​12. While the people are enjoined to remember the land continues to belong to YHWH, there is always the threat that they come to understand their history of habitation as one of self-​attainment. It is as though possession transforms a prior mindset, where the land was forever ‘up ahead’, a promise, something to hope for. But when this promise is realized –​when the people take possession of the land –​they are freed from a life of wandering and uncertainty and begin to see this long-​promised land as something to take for granted. Without hope and expectation, reliance on YHWH may not be sustained. Contemplating Israel’s relationship with the Promised Land, Walter Brueggemann describes two histories that coexist in the Bible.6 One concerns those who physically lose the land they originally had because God expels them from it, such as Adam and Eve (Gen. 3.22–​4), Cain (Gen. 4.10–​16) and the inhabitants of Babel (Gen. 11.1–​9). The second is a history of landlessness as a summons to movement and new beginnings, as found in the patriarchal and wilderness traditions of Genesis and Exodus. In the first history, relationship to the land has resulted in dispossession, while in the second, this

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relationship brings about a state of being which we may term ‘nomadic’.7 Yet these two histories are the experience of one people, stretching back to their origins at the time of creation; they are a people of displacement, wandering and new settlement. Hence, as the people of Israel prepare to enter ‘into the land which the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance’, Moses commands them to remember that ‘a wandering Aramean was my father’ (Deut. 26.4–​9). They have come from another place, a long and demanding journey undertaken on the basis of a prophetic word; they have responded to a summons, and an invitation to discontinuity. Israel begins to learn that their God is a God who makes all things new. And, in order to have a new history, one must first depart. It is a form of repentance, an abandonment of the old and the weary in favour of what Walter Brueggemann calls ‘an intention of the promiser’.8 The ‘not yet’ promise of land from God is itself an enactment of the gradual revelation of God’s character to his people. In the book of Genesis, YHWH tells Abram that the land of Canaan will belong to his descendants (Gen. 12.7; 13.14–​17; 15.18–​21). Yet when Abram sets out on his initial journey from the city of Haran, he in no way embodies this future blessedness, being a landless nomad. It is YHWH who has told him to depart, and so this migration must take place; his own life and the lives of his descendants depend on it. When he sets out, Abram is already ‘in a land’, the new home of his kinsmen and father (Gen. 11.31–​2). But he must leave, being told by God only that he will be shown ‘the’ land (Gen. 12.1). This is a journey that we are able to read as enacting salvation. While on such a journey, hope is always ‘up ahead’, an act of faith; it cannot be reified or reduced to ‘knowledge’. And, while such hope is sustaining, there is never certainty or contentment. In Gen. 13.14, YHWH invites Abraham to ‘take in’ the land and to look ‘from the place where you are standing, to the north, south, east and west’. This ‘taking in’ of the Promised Land is akin to measuring it, a quasi-​legal procedure reassuring Abraham that the land will become the possession of his descendants.9 This is similar to the belief, expressed by Rabbi Eliezer, in which ‘one acquires a piece of land by walking its length and breadth’.10 In the late 1950s, McCahon began hanging some of his paintings as large unstretched canvases. The first such work, ‘Northland Panels’, was painted in 1958 and consisted of eight unstretched canvas panels with abstract landscapes from the Northland

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region of New Zealand. Given the scale of this art work (178 x 625 mm), viewers had to walk past each panel in order to view the painting, evoking for them the impression of ‘walking through’ the landscape.11 The resonances with Rabbi Eliezer’s piece of rabbinic wisdom are powerful. McCahon suggested that this exhibition style granted the painting ‘more freedom to act’.12 The viewer could become immersed in it, living ‘within’ it and encountering each panel as a succession of revelations unfolding in time. Through such an encounter, the viewer’s ‘possession’ of McCahon’s painted land inspires a transforming sense of their own investment and inclusion in this land. McCahon is thus critiquing the notions of land adopted by European settlers to New Zealand.

‘There is a land of pure delight’ During the years of European settlement in the early to mid-​eighteenth century, it was common for New Zealand to be sold to prospective settlers as an ‘Arcadia’, a country of natural abundance and fertility.13 Some of this was classic advertising copy; selling a land that had not even been seen by those bringing settlers to it. Nevertheless, it was also a description used by those who settled in New Zealand. Many descriptions exist from the 1800s of New Zealand as a ‘garden’, rich in productivity and variety.14 Moreover, speculation abounded as to the wealth of natural resources that might lie under the land, although this was mere conjecture.15 This confidence was a product of the Victorian era’s faith in material progress and the expectation that such development went hand in hand with moral growth. There was something of an imperative to this development, a subconscious tension between the notion of the land as teeming with fertility and beauty, yet necessarily subject to human transformation. However, such was the natural abundance and productive potential of this raw material that only a light hand was needed to shape it beneficially.16 One common feature of these early descriptions of New Zealand was the use of religious, particularly biblical, language. For example, the Reverend Thomas Burns, an eighteenth-​century religious leader in the early settlement of Otago, wrote somewhat bucolically of a land of ‘herds and flocks’, ‘yellow corn’, ‘rural husbandry’, ‘pretty farms and . . . happy smiling cottages . . . in some sylvan dell’, where all the people dwelt, proud in their discipleship to Christ.17 Others

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compared New Zealand to the Garden of Eden or to Canaan, the Promised Land.18 Such biblical language was also taken up by New Zealand’s early conservation movement in the nineteenth century. These conservationists held that the richness of the soils and the flourishing growth created by the temperate climate must not be lost through deforestation and subsequent environmental collapse. They advocated a very particular kind of stewardship, one that sought preservation, but also domestication, and often used biblical language in pressing their argument for looking after the natural environment.19 One example of this can be seen in the writing of nineteenth-​century New Zealand politician and conservationist William Thomas Locke Travers, when he commented that ‘the plains of Babylon and Ninevah . . . once described [as] flowing with milk and honey [had become] a howling desolation’.20 These early conservationists held that New Zealand’s environment was God’s creation, and therefore of ‘intrinsic as well as instrumental value’.21 This outlook was imported by European settlers in the form of a natural theology, in which the more spectacular elements of nature proclaimed the power of the Creator.22 Within this theology, the natural world was understood to be a text for moral lessons and mediating the experience of God. As God’s creation, the land had an inherent value. The Reverend William Colenso, a nineteenth-​ century Christian missionary, botanist and explorer in New Zealand, spoke of the land as a ‘living garment’ of the ‘Invisible’.23 These were Romantic notions of the Sublime in nature, which flourished, at least in part, due to the absence of religious structures in nineteenth-​century New Zealand. This absence allowed the wild landscapes to be understood as ‘natural cathedrals’ of divine glory and magnificence.24 One could come to know God and the divine through one’s emotional experience of the natural world.25 Yet sometimes the experiences of settlers were at odds with these depictions of fruitfulness and their associations with bountiful living. Many settlers found themselves in isolated and desolate situations, with few material comforts and even fewer social interactions. Moreover, they often had little more than a prosaic and practical relationship to the land; profit was a powerful motivation for land acquisition and land speculation was common.26 It is telling that the land they had left in order to come to New Zealand came to be called ‘home’. As Rollo Arnold explains, those who migrated to New Zealand did so convinced that they were

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leaving a land of bondage and want for a land of freedom and plenty. But inevitably the new land was found to have unexpected lacks . . . Commonly, it would seem, the bitter memories faded, while the nature of the continuing links with the old world kept alive and enriched a consciousness of the positive values of the world they had left. England was referred to as the ‘Old Country’ and as ‘Home’, and these expressions carried rich connotations of love and longing. In comparison with the Old Country, the colony was sensed to be somehow fragmentary and incomplete.27

There was also another voice that joined in this more negative discourse of theology and land: that of the early missionaries. For some missionaries, New Zealand was blighted by paganism and her landscape made this manifest. Nineteenth-​century Anglican priest and missionary Richard Taylor, for example, ‘linked the barrenness of the landscape with sin, with a failure to revere God’.28 This belief spurred missionaries on to spread the gospel and with it, European technologies of land cultivation. Wilderness was the mark of Adam’s fall. A  right relationship with God would ‘restore’ the land, as a well as her inhabitants, to well-​being.29

Colin McCahon and the Promised Land Just as these early settlers in Aotearoa New Zealand encountered the land in contradictory ways, so too is Colin McCahon’s interrogation of this theme in his paintings often complex and conflicting. This exploration of the Promised Land in a number of his works is the subject of some debate among New Zealand art critics, as is his wider use of religious subjects and his employment of both Christian texts and images.30 Some critics consider McCahon’s Christian iconography genuine, rather than a convenient symbolic vehicle, but have been inclined to see in his work a progression towards the failure of faith. However, McCahon’s works whose subject matter is ostensibly the Promised Land (and indeed, the wider body of his work) suggest otherwise. Though his faith may have been non-​traditional, even non-​Christian by the end of his life, his use of Christian motifs do not betray an abandonment of faith. His own comments on such matters were at least paradoxical. At times, he said he was a Christian, yet at other times, he denied this, claiming only to

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have a great affinity for the symbolism of Christianity but no denominational interest.31 Certainly, his use of Christian iconography included traditional subjects such as the Annunciation, the Madonna and Child, the Crucifixion and the Entombment.32 Alexa Johnson suggests his religious work is an attempt to answer a broad question: ‘How may I understand my experience of a relationship with God?’33 In the discussion that follows, I will suggest that he could not use religious content, particularly such resonant material as the notion of the Promised Land, the way he does unless it cohered with his imaginative and spiritual encounter with the world. McCahon created his art in a society whose public claims to being ‘Godzone’34 were often at variance with the lived experience of its citizens. The rise of cultural nationalism in 1930s New Zealand culture was born out of this tension. The desire, even the imperative, to inhabit imaginatively the surrounding country rather than locating ‘home’ in distant, idealized locations was something to which McCahon was already an heir by the time he began painting. New Zealand poet A. R. D. Fairburn had challenged painters in 1934 to abandon their received notions of landscape and the legacy of the English tradition, a summons that McCahon was already wholly sympathetic toward: There is no golden mist in the air . . . no soft warm colour to breed a school of painters from the stock of Turner, Crome, Cotman and Wilson Steer. Hard, clear light reveals the bones, the sheer form, of hills, trees, stones and scrub. We must draw rather than paint, even if we are using a brush, or we shall not be perfectly truthful.35

Yet McCahon thought New Zealand was a Promised Land touched by angels –​‘who can herald beginnings’36 –​a land that had the quality of Promise, or Advent, in that time before Christ. This land was not the location of the nativity, but of the annunciation before both the Saviour’s birth and the Cross. McCahon believed it was his task to bring about an ‘awakening’ in New Zealander’s attitude to the land. The empty landscape is what it is; his task was to awaken New Zealanders to a relationship with it. McCahon in his youth described a vision he had of the landscape as one of ‘splendour, and order and peace’.37 Such qualities did not apply to the people themselves, who are usually absent from McCahon’s landscapes. Any reality to the description of New Zealand as a ‘Promised Land’ was one of

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geology; not an issue of scenery but the formation and structure of the country, without interpretation added.38 Hence there was for McCahon a character of orderliness and peace existing in the land and this was the vision he sought to communicate and to ‘invent a way to see’.39 His refusal to allow to his fellow New Zealanders the possession of eyes to ‘see’ the promise of the land is in accordance with his emphasis that it is not the people whose works make the land. The land is already made; it is already a home that only waits to be recognized. This is what the artist does, showing us what is there through their unique way of seeing the world, expressing in a material form their personal interaction with the world. In this way, the artist is ethical. McCahon is rejecting the notion that the land only has value when it is formed according to human intention. The Promised Land is not the creation of settler election. McCahon generalized the landscape, through a recognizable but inexact representation, in order to make it a ‘new world’.40 This is both an unveiling and a making strange. McCahon understood history as a journey ‘into the infinite’.41 Such a view of history resonates with the biblical promise of renewal that culminates in the eschatological Kingdom, in which all things are freed of what enslaves them and can flourish without the distortion of their nature that sin has brought about. McCahon’s painting reaches for this condition, including his depiction of the Promised Land. McCahon’s Promised Land exists as a cultural memory rather than as a motif of active faith. The motif is a metaphor of his journey as an artist, his own search and longing. In apocalyptic traditions, the world will become God’s dwelling place; creation’s history culminates in the descent of the New Jerusalem to earth (Rev. 21.1–​2). The Promised Land itself is a foretaste of this lived, concrete and local intimacy of God. To attain the Promised Land, the wilderness of the world must be passed through. The promises concerning the land are ‘this-​worldly’ and include keeping the words of the Law (Josh. 1.8) and walking in God’s ways. The Promised Land is only entered through reconciliation of the tension between particularity of place and the unsullied vision engendered by promise. If this is translated to McCahon’s notion of the Promised Land, his representation is not generalized to the point of anonymity but rather expresses a vision in which every place becomes more particular as the stricture of landscape conventions are removed.

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Figure 13.1  Colin McCahon, Takaka: Night and Day, 1948. Reproduced with permission from the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust.

This interplay is exactly what we see in McCahon’s Takaka painting (Figure  13.1). In relation to this work, McCahon remarked that it was the ‘memory’ of an ‘experience of a particular place’. Attending to the words ‘particular’ and ‘experience’, this is McCahon’s memory, no one else’s, and he creates it despite the difficulty of depicting an experience in visual form. McCahon’s experience is presented through his process of reflection and our own experience of interpreting the painting. Place has creatively enabled the memory to transform the particular. McCahon is able to depict this landscape because it lives within him. Takaka is here, but not as a literal picturing. In scripture, the land has significance as a particular place that has been promised. This is Brueggemann’s point about the Promised Land –​it necessitates a journey in order to become a true habitation. As a promise, the land is a gift, shaping present action and renovating memory. It is not the land that is a wilderness for McCahon, but those living in it, who suffer displacement and estrangement by which memory and embodiment are undone. Yet the biblical Promised Land was only attained by journeying through wilderness. This journey prepared the people to possess the land. The wilderness is a space far from ordered land; it is the form taken by chaos.42 No newness can come in the wilderness, yet this unmanaged wilderness is exactly the place where the people found YHWH’s presence with them and were sustained by this presence.43 As a painter, McCahon saw himself, like Moses, as the prophet leading his compatriots to their possession of the Promised Land. But he also remarked

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that just as ‘Moses was not permitted by God to reach the Promised Land –​ this place [is] where the painter never arrives’.44 The prophet is the one crying in the wilderness (Isa. 40.3; c.f. Mk 1.3; Jn 1.23). Such prophetic speaking is central to the 1948 work The Promised Land (Figure 13.2). The particular is present; the hills are of Nelson, and Farewell Spit curves protectively as a path to the North, a beginning and an end. The artist (in his black singlet) looks over this land and an angel (McCahon’s wife Anne) announces New Zealand to be the Promised Land. McCahon depicts purity and light symbolically in the jug of water and candle respectively.45 Both the light and the jug sustain travelers on the journey through the wilderness. The lamp is the light of art or faith, while the jug is the pure water of Christ, giving absolution and thus new life. The semi-​circular insert device was used by McCahon to capture two differing time frames in one space and to hold together the relationship of the land itself and the human presence therein. This painting is a message of hope. Just as with Abraham and the people of God, the promise of the land is bound up with the promise of divine presence (Gen. 17.8).46 This is not the basis of any claim to the land, but

Figure 13.2  Colin McCahon, The Promised Land, 1948. Reproduced with permission from the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust.

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reveals that God will stand with the people, even if they have suffered expulsion. McCahon did not abandon the promise, even as it retreated from him. Just as the Promised Land was a gift for Abraham, which would be realized in his descendants, so too McCahon understood his own work as a kind of gifting. If transcendence is to be intimated in such works, it is because the material world is our only means of envisioning the transcendent. The Promised Land comes to us in the material tangibility of canvas, pigment and the brush-​strokes of the artist. In this way McCahon achieves a symbolic liberation of the structure that inheres to the land. It is on the grid of the land that we make culture. The land becomes symbol and metaphor, a canvas. Mountains become the location of God. Horizons become intimations of possibility, of open distance, as much as encircling and closure. A Promised Land is a goal reached by journey, by setting out toward ambiguous horizons. The letter to the Hebrews (11.8) says this of Abraham: ‘By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place which he was to receive as an inheritance; and he went out not knowing where he was to go.’47 As McCahon notes in his comments on Takaka: Night and Day, landscape was for him ‘a symbol of place and also of the human condition’.48 It was a device, in other words, by which to comment on the human condition, even to explicitly criticize New Zealanders’ attitude to their surroundings. The Promised Land is only attained by beginning in homelessness, experiencing a journey of faith that enables us to re-​turn to the land, cleansed of our misconceptions. A work such as Takaka: Night and Day contains a land devoid of human construction and intervention. In its physical presentation, in the space of the canvas, there is land whose stillness broods with YHWH’s sufficient hidden presence. McCahon offers us what the land means in symbolic terms  –​so much so that we no longer see the physical reality. He does not annihilate the sensory phenomena ‘out there’. He reveals it to us primarily as a place where we have never yet been, but which we nonetheless long for. It is as though McCahon is nostalgic for a salvation that only he bears the burden of glimpsing or ‘seeing’.49 This is strengthened by the painting’s enclosure of both night and day, the two people on either side of the landscape and the distant horizon of sunrise and sunset. It is a painting that makes time visible and that holds all the complementary pairs together, present to each other, just as the

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semi-​circular devices (on the top right and centre bottom) accomplish in The Promised Land. In Takaka: Night and Day, empty of people or language, the pictorial space is not static. If the human population is elsewhere, then the natural world itself is active, in that it is there; it has an absolute presence. Such a powerful ‘thereness’ suggests that for us it is an ‘Other’  –​a confronting presence. To possess the Promised Land, the people of God must initiate and endure conflict. Likewise, to be ‘at home’ in this land we must wrestle with ourselves, enduring a conflict that will help us become clear in our self-​knowledge. Walking this land, and McCahon’s representations of it, involves us in an invention of ourselves. We decipher the land by being with it, spending time with it. McCahon’s faith, such as it may have been, did not require him to depict literally the biblical Promised Land. McCahon is not materially expressing a Christian theology. We are all, he says, part of ‘very beautiful and terrible mysteries’.50 What he gives us are paintings that unveil another way of seeing what is under our feet. His message is that we build the Promised Land from what we have to hand, but only when we see what is there without illusions or sentimentality. McCahon turns back explicitly to this theme in his later series of four paintings, Was This the Promised Land (1962). In one of the paintings from this series,51 the black ground upon which the words ‘was this the promised land’ are written is akin to McCahon’s semi-​circular devices in The Promised Land. Here it is the darkness of the tomb, a location where another time holds sway or where a different life is lived. The great sweep of land encasing this recalls his ‘waterfall’ works of 1964–​65, especially Waterfall (no. 3), but seems to cut through only darkness. Its path-​like form has an end-​point that is at best ambiguous –​possibly a true journey of faith (or even the absence of faith). The whole painting suggests a reassessment of the character of the land and its people, with its dark, shadowed upper edge intimating a journey into or out of darkness. But above it, a dark rectangle echoes the ‘gate’ spaces of the same period52 in which closure is resisted, a way through is possible. The dark rectangle is set in a horizonless, unconfined, unspecified white space. It is an invitation to departure –​to move into a new way of things. But it is an invitation that is only reticent and uncertain, more a question left hanging.53

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As McCahon’s art developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he relinquishes the attainment of a Promised Land. Darkness and uncertainty led him on another artistic journey –​one without an earthly kingdom or a Promised Land calling him forward. Yet in his earlier works, he had tried to show us that the Promised Land of New Zealand was always the land already under our feet and that we needed to (re)discover our relationship with it. For McCahon, this is what the artist does; he functions as YHWH, the divine presence who spoke words of reassurance to Abraham (Gen. 17.8; 18.19), countering his incredulity by revealing to him gifts. In the wilderness, YHWH’s was the brooding always obscured presence, the one who was up ahead. The land was a God-​ given gift, not the creation of those who received it. Moreover, all that came from YHWH, and analogously, from McCahon, did not bring closure, but possibility and transformation. McCahon was an artist, so he addresses ways in which we see. In this respect, he stands in a different place to the people but summons them as best as he can to a reality they have not yet discovered. He presents to the viewer, to his fellow settler New Zealanders, a personal and atemporal image, which is not inattentive to historical particulars. Was This the Promised Land is a work that suggests things have gone awry but have not been annihilated. The band of white can be seen as a space filled with the possibility of place. And the tomb-​like semi-​circle on the left is not devoid of potency either. From such an enclosure came life (Lk. 23.5) as well as a containing of death. This is another reading of the Promised Land, which transcends specific location, and recognizes a fellowship of abiding habitation.

A searching conclusion What then of McCahon and his motif of the Promised Land? The biblical promise of this land is made, first to Abraham and his descendants, and then later to Moses and the Hebrews as they make their way through the wilderness. From the beginning, it was a divine blessing that was securely tied to a sense of nationhood, of belonging. With McCahon, the Promised Land takes two directions: toward a ‘way of being’ and, as a visual representation, transformation through memory. McCahon’s commitment to seeing the raw geological

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bones of the country has produced an art of metaphysical longing. In the end, it is about belonging where one is, through seeing what is there as ‘blessing’, and being open to transformation. A deep magic exists in the way that the particular seeing of McCahon is embodied in an image, received by each viewer individually, but in tandem with the historical context. The Promised Land is not defined by McCahon, but its real import is in the journeying. The Promised Land acts as an aide memoire, akin to the God received by faith –​something for which one sets out with longing, though only knowing one desired it after it is found. McCahon was interpreting an idea that was first imported into New Zealand by immigrants, many of whom, as we have seen, identified New Zealand as a Promised Land.54 Part of the power of this idea arose from the act of coming from somewhere else. At one level, it also meant a certain self-​determination. In Takaka: Night and Day the land broods. There is something both promising and threatening to it. In The Promised Land, a light of confidence is clarifying and ordering a way forward, from the here and now. But by the time McCahon asks the question, Was This the Promised Land, the confidence is expressed more ambiguously. Now the Promised Land is not a self-​assured summons but is hesitant, needing a necessary resistance to other narratives and vulnerable to a shifting light in which the way is glimpsed and then obscured. This is not the collapse of hope, but the fruit of experience’s contingencies. The Promised Land is necessarily ‘up ahead’ –​for once it is attained it ceases to exist.

Notes 1. Colin McCahon’s art can be viewed at the Colin McCahon Online Catalogue, available online: http://​www.mccahon.co.nz. 2. Cited in Gordon H. Brown, Colin McCahon: Artist (Wellington: A.H. & A.W. Reed, 1984), 199. 3. McCahon did this painting after leaving the region, and from memory. 4. Just as the Promised Land of Israel was itself inhabited prior to the Israelite conquest, so too was New Zealand inhabited by indigenous Māori at the time of colonial expansion in this region. McCahon was well aware of this, and in some of his works –​such as The Lark’s Song (1969), Parihaka Triptych (1972), Monuments to Te Whiti and to Tohu (1972) –​he engages explicitly with the tangata whenua

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(‘the people of the land’). With regard to the Promised Land motif, his paintings are directed more towards settler experiences of the New Zealand land, which will be the focus of this chapter. 5. John Goldingay, Old Testament Theology. Volume 1: Israel’s Gospel (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2003), 210. 6. Walter Brueggemann, The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), 15. 7. Claus Westermann, Genesis 12–​36: A Commentary, trans. John J. Scullion (Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 1985), 152. 8. Brueggemann, The Land, 18. 9. Westermann, Genesis, 180. 10. Gen. R., xli.10; cited in Westermann, Genesis, 180. 11. ‘McCahon’s Northland panels’, on Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa website, available online: http://​collections.tepapa.govt.nz/​topic/​946. 12. Ian Wedde and Gregory Burke, Now See Hear! Art, Language and Translation (Wellington: Victoria University, 1990), 170. 13. Ibid., 29. The title of this section is the opening line of a hymn by Isaac Watts (1709) and also a poem by Thomas Hood (1799–​1845). 14. Ibid., 29–​40. 15. Ibid., 3–​32. 16. Ibid., 33–​40. 17. Quoted in James Beattie and John Stenhouse, ‘God and the Natural World in Nineteenth-​C entury New Zealand’, in Christianity Modernity and Culture: New Perspectives on New Zealand History, ed. John Stenhouse (Adelaide: ATF Press, 2005), 186. 18. Ibid. There was little concern among the early settlers with the already inhabited reality of New Zealand and little dialogue with Māori concepts of the land. 19. Ibid., 196–​200. 20. Ibid., 197. 21. Ibid., 188. 22. Ibid., 189. 23. Ibid., 194. 24. Ibid., 192. 25. The artist and environmentalist Alfred Sharpe (1836–​1908), for example, expresses this theology in his poem called ‘The Forest Temples of New Zealand’ (1888). 26. Trudie McNaughton, ‘Introduction’ in Countless Signs: The New Zealand Landscape in Literature. An Anthology, ed. Trudie McNaughton (Auckland: Reed Methuen, 1986), 7.

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27. Rollo Arnold, The Farthest Promised Land: English Villagers, New Zealand Immigrants of the 1870s (Wellington: Victoria University, 1981), 354. 28. McNaughton, ‘Introduction’, 8. 29. Beattie and Stenhouse, ‘God and the Natural World’, 164. 30. Such subject matter entered his work with I Paul to you at Ngatimoti (1946). 31. Interestingly, however, his son attests to his father’s early membership of the Society of Friends, the Quakers. See William McCahon, ‘A Letter Home’, in Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith, ed. Maria Bloem and Martin Browne (Nelson, Amsterdam: Craig Potton and Stedelikj Museum, 2002), 30. 32. Alexa M. Johnson, ‘God-​Talk –​McCahon and Theology’, in Colin McCahon: Gates and Journeys, ed. Michael Gifkins (Auckland: Auckland City Art Gallery, 1988), 56. 33. Ibid., 57. 34. Godzone is a contraction of ‘God’s own country’. 35. A. R. D. Fairburn, ‘Some Aspects of NZ Art and Letters’, Art in New Zealand 6, no. 4 (1934): 215. 36. Colin McCahon, ‘Beginnings’, Landfall 80 (1966): 364. Quoted in Gordon H. Brown, Toward A Promised Land: On the Life and Art of Colin McCahon, (Auckland: Auckland University, 2010), 125. 37. Quoted in Brown, Towards a Promised Land, 125. 38. Charles Andrew Cotton’s Geomorphology of New Zealand (Wellington: Dominion Museum, 1922) was a great influence on McCahon. This book laid bare the land, not as scenic or picturesque, but as the consequence of the forces of primal formation. 39. McCahon, ‘Beginnings’, 364. 40. Ron O’Reilly, quoted in Brown, Towards a Promised Land, 104. 41. Brown, Towards a Promised Land, 125. 42. Brueggemann, The Land, 29. 43. Goldingay, Old Testament Theology, 453; see Deuteronomy 1.19, 31, 33; 2.7. 44. McCahon, ‘Beginnings’, 364, quoted in Brown, Towards a Promised Land, 125. 45. The candle and lamp were the first symbols McCahon used in his early religious works to symbolize light. See Neil Rowe, ‘Notes toward a McCahon ABC’, in Art New Zealand 8 (1977–​78), n.p., available online: http://​www.art-​ newzealand.com/​Issues1to40/​mccahon08nr.htm. 46. Westermann, Genesis, 262. 47. McCahon quotes this passage in his painting A Letter to the Hebrews (1979). 48. Cited in Brown, Colin McCahon, 199. 49. Robert Leonard, ‘Colin McCahon’, in Toi, Toi, Toi: Three Generations of Artists from New Zealand (Auckland: Museum Fridericianum Kassel, Auckland Art Gallery, 1999), 27. 50. Quoted in Brown, Towards a Promised Land, 107.

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51. I am unable to share a copy of this painting, but it can be viewed (along with all his major works) on the Colin McCahon catalogue website, available online: http://​www.mccahon.co.nz/​cm000880. 52. McCahon painted many works with ‘Gate’ in the title during the 1960s. 53. The painting dates from a time when McCahon was protesting French nuclear testing in the Pacific. This testing had great potential to damage the environment and also to render any dialogue about New Zealand as the Promised Land moot. 54. As noted, this was because of its purported fertility. But this was also an aspiration of social egalitarianism, one that became something of a cliché in the popular description of New Zealand as ‘God’s own country’ and ironically assumed a land devoid of inhabitants when the first settlers arrived.

Bibliography Arnold, Rollo. The Farthest Promised Land: English Villagers, New Zealand Immigrants of the 1870s. Wellington: Victoria University, 1981. Beattie, James, and John Stenhouse. ‘God and the Natural World in Nineteenth-​ Century New Zealand’. In Christianity Modernity and Culture: New Perspectives on New Zealand History, edited by John Stenhouse, 180–​203. Adelaide: ATF Press, 2005. Brown, Gordon H. Colin McCahon: Artist. Wellington: A.H. & A.W. Reed, 1984. Brown, Gordon H. Towards a Promised Land: On the Life and Art of Colin McCahon. Auckland: Auckland University, 2010. Brueggemann, Walter. The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977. Fairburn, A. R. D. ‘Some Aspects of NZ Art and Letters’. Art in New Zealand 6, no. 4 (1934): 216–​47. Fairburn, Miles. The Ideal Society and its Enemies: The Foundation of Modern New Zealand Society 1850–​1900. Auckland: Auckland University, 1989. Goldingay, John. Old Testament Theology. Volume 1: Israel’s Gospel. 3 vols. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2003. Johnson, Alexa M. ‘God-​Talk –​McCahon and Theology’. In Colin McCahon: Gates and Journeys, edited by Michael Gifkins, 55–​68. Auckland: Auckland City Art Gallery, 1988. Leonard, Robert. ‘Colin McCahon’. In Toi, Toi, Toi: Three Generations of Artists from New Zealand, 26–​33. Catalogue published to accompany exhibition of the same name. Kassell: Museum Fridericianum; Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery, 1999. McCahon, Colin. ‘Beginnings’. Landfall 80 (1966): 360–​4.

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McMahon, William. ‘A Letter Home’. In Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith, edited by Maria Bloem and Martin Browne, 29−37. Nelson, Amsterdam: Craig Potton and Stedelikj Museum, 2002. McNaughton, Trudie (ed.). Countless Signs: The New Zealand Landscape in Literature. An Anthology. Auckland: Reed Methuen, 1986. Wedde, Ian, and Gregory Burke. Now See Hear! Art, Language and Translation. Wellington: Victoria University, 1990. Westermann, Claus. Genesis 12–​36: A Commentary. Translated by John J. Scullion. Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 1985.

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‘The Painting Is Suffering’ Māori and Pasefika Boys Respond to Images of Christ and Peter Jacky Sewell

During 2009, ten 14-​year-​old boys from Pasefika1 and Māori backgrounds took part in a four-​month art and spirituality project located in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. What started as a piece of doctoral research –​an examination of the ways in which visual art acts as a vehicle for spiritual well-​being –​became an intense and humbling experience. A group of young people, most of whom had never sat in contemplation with a piece of art before, were giving up hours of sports time, cultural practice time, hobby time, homework time and free time in order to sit with a strange, middle-​aged Pākehā/​Palagi woman2 who was asking them deeply personal and difficult questions in front of two DVD cameras and writing into her notebook as they spoke.3 Why did they choose to participate? What was it that so grasped their hearts and thoughts and spirituality that they seized ownership of the project, taking over the direction of the group, making it their own, and speaking freely of deeply personal family stories and their own faith stance? On the surface, art such as an Italian fresco, an old Russian icon, a photograph of an African chapel, European surrealism and abstraction and a New Zealand picture of a bird all stand at huge cultural distance from a boarding school in South Auckland, which has a deep pride in forming young leaders who will carry their cultural heritage into their futures. Would it not have been more culturally sensitive and sensible to have used their own art as vehicles for discussing questions of God and spirituality? Why import foreign images, when

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so many good Pasefika art works already surrounded them as part of an excellent school collection? This chapter explores these questions via three narrative encounters between the boys and art works of biblical figures:  Frank Wesley’s Peter’s Denial (c. 1970), Gustave van der Woestyne’s Christ in the Wilderness (1939) and Andrei Rubev’s The Saviour (c. 1410). First, the context of the research is described. A  synopsis is then given of the conversations that took place around each painting, including a discussion of the ways in which the young men responded aesthetically, morally, with their religious imagination, and with their whole being. Finally, some comments about the capacity of art to transcend boundaries and affect the whole person will conclude this chapter.

Spiritual well-​being in the South Pacific Research into spirituality in Aotearoa New Zealand can be both daunting and richly rewarding. Aotearoa New Zealand bridges the worlds of western European cultures, indigenous Māori and other Pasefika cultures. Within the Western world, particularly Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, a post-​Christian mindset dominates much research into spirituality, and a perceived tension between religion and spirituality is felt keenly within society and education systems. For many countries, on the one hand, a secular education system is thought to be incompatible with overt Christian teaching. On the other hand, all religions are to be respected and the spiritual needs of all students safeguarded. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the cultural and spiritual needs of Māori and other South Pacific cultures are recognized within schools’ education curricula, which has adopted Māori elder and psychiatrist Sir Mason Durie’s Whaiora model of well-​being.4 Within this model, the four components of hauora (well-​being) are conceptualized as the four sides of a whare (house): taha tinana (physical well-​being), taha hinengaro (mental and emotional well-​being), taha whānau (social well-​being) and taha wairua (spiritual well-​being). Durie speaks from a holistic understanding of well-​being, whereby physical, cultural and spiritual aspects of life cannot be separated, as that which affects the one affects the whole.

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In a similar manner, Michael Shirres, a Māori elder and Catholic priest, described te tangata (the human person) as the linking of mana (personal power) and tapu (spiritual power).5 He speaks of it in this way: A Māori way of expressing this worth of the human person is to speak of a person’s mana or power . . . mana which is the actualization, the realization, of the tapu of the person, is threefold, mana tangata, power from the people, mana whenua, power from the land and mana atua, power from our link with the spiritual powers.6

This holism  –​embracing culture, the land, society, body, mind and spirit  –​ finds resonance with other Pacific cultures; ‘Ana Koloto of the University of the South Pacific, Suva, speaks of Tongan well-​being this way: Tongans view life as a holistic process, the main purpose of which is the development of the tangata kakato (total person). There are three main aspects of development . . . mo’ui fakasino (body or physical well-​being), mo’ui faka’atamai (mind or intellectual well-​being), mo’ui fakalaumalie (soul or spiritual well-​being).7

While state schools and other westernized institutions might be cautious about spiritual and religious concerns, for many Māori and Pacific peoples today, it is important that Te Atua and te wairua, or ‘Otua and laumalie (God and spirit in Māori and Tongan respectively), are acknowledged, regardless of denomination or religious tradition. Similar holistic understandings of the human person and spiritual well-​ being are found within the ancient Hebrew and early Christian traditions which contributed significantly to an emerging European culture. When asked what the greatest commandment is (Mk 12.28–​34), Jesus invokes the Shema (Deut. 6.4–​9):  ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.’ Jesus then expands this Hebrew teaching, which describes the total capacity a human being has when expressing love for God, and extends the realms of spiritual well-​being to include love for neighbor and self: ‘The second [commandment] is this, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these’ (Mk 12.31).

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Within contemporary Western culture, such multifaceted, holistic understandings of well-​being form the backbone of theories of human development, as well as theories of spiritual well-​being. In research conducted for the Australian secular schools’ education curriculum, John Fisher identified from existing studies of spirituality four ‘domains’ which together constitute spiritual health:  the personal domain, incorporating such things as meaning, purpose and values; the communal domain, involving morality, culture and relationships; the environmental domain, focusing on stewardship and connectedness with nature; and the transcendental domain, which considers awareness of a ‘cosmic force’ or God.8 Considering the parallel translations and the various cultural texts and theories offered earlier –​Māori, Pasefika, Australian, Hebrew and Christian –​we cannot assume that concepts such as ‘mind’, ‘spirit’ or ‘well-​being’ carry exactly the same meanings across these different contexts. Even between the different Jewish and Gentile cultures within which Jesus’ teachings were first heard, nuances of connotation and difference existed around these concepts; how much more, then, between English, Māori and various Pasefika traditions, where the differences also include vast geographic distances. However the different cultural perspectives on spiritual well-​being that I have outlined here each share a common emphasis on the whole person. Therefore, while it may be possible to excel in any one area of life (such as intellectual pursuits, compassionate actions in the community or physical prowess), it is, nevertheless, our total human capacity, working in harmony, which constitutes well-​being. It is this integration or interaction of dimensions that formed the benchmark in the conversations about art that I had with the ten young men who took part in my research. The art work itself was presented around the four themes of love for Neighbour, love for World, love for Self and love for God which were drawn from Fisher’s four domains of spiritual health.9 The conversations that I had with the boys were evaluated according to the degree that these dimensions of spirituality were fused, and according to the extent that the young people engaged their capacities of emotion, intellect, behavioural will and awareness of God. The results I obtained, some of which are discussed later in this chapter, indicate the remarkable capacity that art has for facilitating a holistic, narrative response.

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The field research The conversations which follow were drawn from a project which lasted five months. Three modes of engaging with the art were utilized: a series of six focus groups where participants interacted with their peers and with the art works, which were projected onto a wall; intensive interviews with myself where participants could reflect at more depth on the art and matters they did not want to discuss in front of their peers; and private written reflections in a journal provided for the purpose, which they gave to me towards the end of the research. All interviews were audio-​recorded and all focus groups video-​recorded. From the focus groups, eleven ‘episodes’ were written up, each episode a narrative around a particular art work. From the intensive interviews, five in-​depth narratives were written up. Seven of the journals also provided substantive material for further reflection during participants’ interviews. Twenty-​two art works were selected from a vast database. These were intentionally chosen to represent a wide variety of global and historical-​cultural forms, in line with my working hypothesis, that an object of visual art functions as a point-​of-​view outside of the individual, against which a person tests and clarifies their own experience. This approach runs counter to popular notions of familiar cultural forms providing the best vehicle for self-​reflection, particularly within youth culture. Theologically, a broader approach acts as a reminder that while we may be ‘housed’ within one predominant culture, we do not exist in isolation either from God or other people, and that spiritual well-​being depends in part on the way in which we form connections outside of our own comfort zones (love for Neighbour). Having said that, for the final focus group, all participants were invited to bring an object or art work of their own, or one that held particular significance. This gave three of the boys the opportunity to share the art they had drawn in their journals; for another boy, his free-​form Pasefika-​style sketching instigated a critical conversation with his peers that gave him personal resolution in a matter of some significance to him.10 The three accounts which follow represent something of the richness of the total collection of narratives. The boys are identified in these narratives by

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the pseudonyms that they chose for themselves: Toko, Me.Cee, Deps, TipTop, TuiJR, Jimmi, Iggi and Polse.

When words fail This painting (Figure 14.1) depicts the moment during Jesus’ arrest and trial, when, upon hearing the cock crow, Jesus has turned and looked at Peter, causing Peter to recall Jesus’ words: ‘ “Before the cock crows, you will have denied me three times”. And he [Peter] went out, and wept bitterly’ (Mt. 26.75). The painting is cloudy, uncertain, needing careful consideration to discern what is there. The colours are dramatic and vivid, merging deep blues and purples and pinks. Peter half stands, half crouches, consumed by whatever thoughts or feelings are within.

Figure 14.1  Frank Wesley, Peter’s Denial, c. 1970.

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This painting has been selected and presented by TuiJR and the discussion moves at a quiet, reflective pace. The image has a depth of emotion that speaks of personal human failings, sensed by the group from the beginning. Two strands are interwoven in this conversation: the aesthetics of the painting, which led to speculation about emotion and the spiritual forces at work on Peter; and the boys’ own physical response as they used their bodies to discern the painting’s meaning. These two strands happened simultaneously, strengthening and clarifying the story that the boys created together as a group, whereby Peter weeps from guilt; he is touched by the hand of either Jesus or the devil; his spirit fades into darkness; he is so ashamed he doesn’t see God’s light covering him; his head is full of misery and confusion; Jesus’ love burns him; eventually he picks himself back up. The aesthetics of this painting grasp the boys from the outset. TuiJR is questioned by his peers about Peter and why it looks like he has blood on his hands. His response to them comes, not in terms of the logic of the story, but in terms of the aesthetics:  ‘Because of the painting’ (he indicates the flow of colour). He imagines and interprets the story by appealing to the image’s aesthetics: the reddish-​pink paint flowing over Peter as blood; the streaks of blue oozing from the canvas like tears: ‘He’s cried out a lot of tears.’ He tells the group that it is the colour which ‘describes the meaning’ of the painting. Sometime later, one of the other boys comments that the blue looks like it is ‘fading’. What could be a static snapshot of Peter’s distress becomes interactive, as the concept of ‘fading’, together with the movement of paint on canvas, creates an imaginative zone whereby the picture comes to life. The word is echoed around the room, gaining momentum, while, at the same time, settling and quieting the mood: ‘fading . . . fading . . . fading . . . into darkness’. In response to a question from me, the boys clarify: it is Peter who is fading, his spirit is dropping before their eyes. As well as human predicament and story, spiritual reality comes to life via the aesthetics of this art work. The contrast between intense colour and profound brightness strikes TipTop first, who uncertainly wonders if there is a ‘source of energy coming out of his head’. This observation is absorbed by the group and leads to a series of comments about God’s light over Peter, a spiritual energy or force, depicted through paint. Unlike other discussions where the boys readily related an art work to their own lives, on this occasion no personal identification is made using words.

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Rather, it happens as the boys use their bodies to engage Peter’s predicament. Thus, Deps clutches his head as he describes how it would feel for Peter to be miserable and confused, with ‘too many things in his head so he can’t –​think’. Jimmi and Me.Cee interact with tender gestures, hands wrapped around each other’s torso, as they explore the touch of God’s light around their shoulders. The meaning of the painting is further discerned via the participants’ own bodies. For example, when the group was pondering whether the hand around Peter’s shoulders was Jesus or the devil, Jimmi and Iggy push and claw at their bodies while looking at the painting to see which felt right. Likewise TipTop indicates various hands on the canvas, not by pointing, but by placing his hands on his own body and face. This is a deeply enacted episode, whereby the power and immediacy of their own bodies offers the boys a connection with Peter’s predicament, and they express the responses of their hearts not simply with words, but primarily through their bodies. The painting has become so affective that it can only be responded to by bodily strength and involvement, to supplement words which fail. In this respect, the boys’ responses mirror the story in the painting, whereby Peter’s words failed him, and he wept. Within Māori and Pasefika cultures, body movement and gesture are finely honed means of communication, fused with song and chant.11 Moreover, youth cultural expression per se in New Zealand has become shaped by Pasefika-​style gestures, alongside the gangsta-​rap-​style gesticulations seen in youth cultures across the world. In predominantly Pasefika-​based communities, such as the boys’ school, it might be said that such self-​expression is the norm. From the outset, this group was marked by high-​energy physical movement as the boys responded to the art, to me and to one another. ‘High fives’ and other group touching happened whenever a group member did particularly well, or when a peer wanted to affirm what had been said, or as alliances were formed. Posing and gesturing happened to the camera as the recording started or ended, or as a participant stood to give a presentation, as a way of making his presence felt and preparing himself. Spontaneous applause would break out in the middle of a speech, as well as at the end. In this encounter with Wesley’s painting, however, something more than brotherly support and bonding had occurred. What had taken place had transcended their own peer network and had enabled them to connect with the spirituality of a painter from South India, who in turn had entered the world of a first-​century Galilean disciple. In his

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article describing a Tongan hermeneutic, Tevita Puloka describes how learning is considered a function of the body; thus, the ‘conditioning of the body for learning mode’ is taken seriously by teachers.12 These boys had done more than simply co-​opt their bodies to assist with interpretation in the services of a religious art research project. The learning that took place was a learning that demanded their whole being, as their whole being –​body, mind and spirit –​ encountered the work of an Indian artist and the immediacy of Peter’s grief. At the end of the session, a couple of the boys said this was their favourite picture. I asked why: what makes this painting so powerful? Responses came quickly from around the room: ‘It’s a very difficult picture to describe, distinctive . . . perspective . . . creativity . . . it’s the colours, bright, feel so energetic.’ From among the art works discussed during this session, the picture which had made the deepest impression was the one that had engaged their personhood most comprehensively: minds which grasped the imaginative possibilities and made sense of Peter’s emotional and physical distress; hearts which empathized and which expressed the emotion through bodily engagement; souls which affirmed that the spiritual force at work was none other than God’s love. Some conversations with other art works revealed a progression or a sequence, as the boys moved from one idea or interpretation to the next. In this instance, emotion, aesthetics, bodily empathy and spiritual forces were fused, akin to the vivid and visceral layers of paint.

A companion on the journey The painting depicts Christ during his forty days in the wilderness, during which time he was tested (Lk. 4.1–​13). Against a stark backdrop of pale sand and sky, a haggard-​faced Christ stands, eyes clear and focused on something beyond the picture, hands poised in an evocative gesture, as if holding something. Woestyne’s Christ in the Wilderness (Figure 14.2) has been picked out by Polse, who retells to his peers the story of Christ, fasting in the wilderness. He pauses, as he struggles with English, his second language. He only knows the word in Tongan –​aukai –​and his peers find the word for him: ‘fasting’. This painting, a portrayal of an extreme physical environment in which Christ

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Figure 14.2  Gustave van de Woestyne, Christ in the Desert, 1939.

has to exert himself mentally, emotionally, spiritually and physically, evokes in the boys a curiosity about Christ’s body and physical state of being. TipTop has been sitting, holding out his hands in front, and says, ‘Holy Communion hands –​like this –​it’s like he’s asking something from God.’ Other participants have been commenting about Christ’s expression:  he seems ‘scared’ and ‘lost and hungry’. This troubles Toko, who sits still and quiet, hand in the air, until he is noticed. His question is too important to just shout out and be lost, it needs care and attention. Eventually, he quietly asks, ‘How can he look lost? How can you describe our Lord Jesus Christ with that word “lost”?’ He is thrown off-​balance by the incongruity of ‘Christ’ and ‘lost’. This is the moment at which the conversation shifts from imaginative speculation to careful consideration. A serious question has been posed, a question that demands an answer which Toko does not have. It is the quick wit of Me.Cee that intervenes: ‘Jesus is the temple of our heart –​and we have Jesus in us when we probably feel lost ourselves.’ Following delighted affirmation from his peers, Me.Cee becomes the triumphant counsel in a courtroom drama  –​‘I rest my case!’  –​cemented by comments from his peers about Me.Cee becoming ‘a good lawyer’. From this

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point on, a fast-​paced debate is accompanied by alliances formed and broken, calls for ‘order!’ and ‘objection!’ and immense good humour. Me.Cee is frequently the one demanding good logical arguments from his peers. Now he projects his own ability onto Christ, who is ‘Probably questioning God’. He proceeds to act as provocateur in the group and opens the picture out to other possibilities, first by asking, ‘What if that wasn’t Jesus?’ The answer to this comes via a tangled web of speculation, personal declarations of faith, convoluted logic, humour and group affirmation of each other. What was a consideration about whether it is possible for Jesus to be lost now evolves into a debate about whether Jesus can be in people who do evil. During this next phase of the conversation, the Christ in the picture metamorphoses into various personas: into the boys themselves, willing hosts to his presence in their hearts; into people who never acknowledge the Christ, lost on their path; into Hitler, oblivious to the Christ. Along the way, these fourteen-​year-​olds are in agreement about one thing, the bottom line of faith: ‘Jesus will help anyone, regardless of what they’ve done.’ To an observer, the boys may simply be indoctrinated, reciting what they have learnt in Religious Education classes. Yet they are performing one of the key tasks held in common by art and religion. They are wrestling with the big questions about the capacities of the Divine, and about good and evil, all from a painting of Jesus just standing there. Throughout the five-​month project, the boys returned time and again to the same few religious metaphors, variants on the theme of good and evil. Thus, dark and light, going to the light, pushing back the darkness, turning to the right way and heaven and hell became overarching themes throughout the research –​ ‘core spiritual metaphors’ as one writer expressed it.13 It is possible to see such conversations as evidence that the boys have been well-​grounded in basic religious concepts and are simply regurgitating them; or perhaps these conversations suggest that the boys are, in Fowler’s terminology, at Stage Two in faith development,14 whereby children absorb their Sunday school lessons within an unsophisticated, literalistic mindset. On the other hand, the question of good and evil is more than just a primal religious concept; it is one of the foundational ‘big questions’ for humankind, and concerns the moral and ethical choices that these young people were seeking to make at this adolescent stage of their lives. These participants were putting such questions within their own framework: in

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this case, a Pasefika spirituality whereby the spiritual realm is real and alongside us. It is an awareness that permeates and bubbles through every discussion in this particular focus group. I had offered the group this deeply introspective painting, aware of its potential to evoke empathetic reflections on loneliness and desolation, and their responses revealed that they were grappling with psychological and spiritual lost-​ness, not simply physical lost-​ness. In terms of an integrated spirituality, this episode traversed the dual terrains of quiet reverence and zealous fervour. The boys’ initial response was to ponder the stark spiritual wilderness and the place of the Christ within it, tentatively allowing their imaginations to penetrate such a sacred environment. The incongruity of this situation then goaded them into an impassioned debate whereby Christ as the sacred Other became Christ their companion and friend on the Way. Such debate provided the conditions for the intertwining of reasoning, humour and faithfulness. For one young person, it afforded the opportunity for his quick wit and philosophic mind to hold centre stage. Me.Cee’s response to Toko’s question was both theologically and linguistically clever. He turned a disconnection into a spiritual analogy, whereby the two incongruent components ‘Christ’ and ‘lost’ were held together via a third element: ‘ourselves’. It was the inclusion of the human person ‘we/​us’ that made an apparent disconnect viable and comprehendible. Theologically, it is our human vulnerability and openness to God that enables a conceptual ‘Christ’ to become the incarnate Jesus, enables the Divine to enter human experience and, in this instance, enabled a solution to the dilemma. Me.Cee’s answer was made by way of mutual identification and relationship, us with Christ, and Christ with us, stemming from his and his classmates’ personal active faith. The theological dynamics were as potent as the linguistic dynamics and, at fourteen, Me.Cee was fully able to make this spiritual and intellectual leap. Also at fourteen, his peers were fully able to appreciate it, even though not all would have had the capacity to make the leap themselves.

Across the thresholds of place and time At first glance, this icon (Figure 14.3) seems hardly worth a place in an art gallery or church. Broken, battered, more than half the picture missing, little of its original gold leaf intact; aesthetically, it is hard to imagine its original splendour.

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Figure 14.3  Andrei Rublev, The Saviour, c. 1410 (also known as Christ the Redeemer).

As the group gathers, it seems smaller than usual; many of the boys are at a late sports training session. I decide to take advantage of this, and ask bashful Deps, who has been happy in previous weeks to let his peers take the lead, if he’d like to present. He is willing and stands to address Rublev’s Saviour, the picture he had chosen for his weekly journaling. Then, part of the way through, three more classmates enter. Deps handles it as best he can. This shy young man is in difficulties, being the leader in front of his classmates, yet he stands tall, face-​to-​face with Rublev’s Christ, projected on the wall behind him. Perhaps this experience of standing up at the front gives him courage, for later in the same session he will declare to Fra Angelico’s Transfiguration, ‘[If I were there] I’ll be in the front. I’m standing tall.’

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He takes his time, looking at the portrait and smiling: ‘This is a picture of God, and it looks like it’s painted on old wood. But it must be old ‘cause its look . . . fading. Yeah. I just like the painting –​those bits of paint. That’s all. I just –​like it!’ He faces the icon, smiling into the face of Christ who gazes back, larger than life, on the same level as him. ‘Yeah I  just like it, miss!’ He keeps turning from us to gaze and smile at the Christ. ‘It just looks –​ alright!’ Deps sits down and I  recap:  the image is so old that half the paint has fallen off the wood. This intrigues the boys who ask, ‘Is it real?’ Perhaps they have thought that the artist has deliberately painted a half-​complete, vaguely abstract portrait of Christ. I repeat, once it was covered with paint but now it has all gone except . . . ‘the face!’ The boys complete my sentence. The significance of this simple fact is about to dawn upon the group as they explore its implications. One of the boys starts to comment on the painting’s damage, but becomes embarrassed and stops mid-​sentence, possibly conscious that his comment might be seen as disrespectful to the Christ. This icon has a presence: Jesus is in the room. The comments which follow are passed back and forth among the group of friends, all of who contribute to the story that emerges. In the following section, I have summarized and abridged the transcription of their conversation: my interpretive additions are in square brackets; the sequence is original. First, the group constructed a Christology: God has an image. The image will always exist, though a part [Christ’s physical body, like his painted body] will be taken away. Like God he’ll never die. The picture is God’s image, Jesus, and Jesus will always be with you. He’ll help you face your fears, in part. Sometimes it doesn’t show [doesn’t appear he is with you], like parts that are missing, but Jesus will always be watching [like the picture].

Second, the mysteries of God’s transcendent presence: We don’t even know what it means [God and the picture]. It is like The Da Vinci Code [full of hidden meaning]. Nevertheless, he loves you and he exists. We don’t really see everything that God does but we know he exists because of the picture, the face.

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Third, a theology of sin, salvation and the eschaton: It’s like how [humankind was ruined] smashed and stuff because of our sins. Like body parts [Jesus’ body in the picture], fading away because of bad stuff that happened. When people do bad stuff, like scraped it [damaging the picture], it’s like how he got whooped and stuff [Jesus suffered]. So the painting is suffering. The painting will slowly disappear, and come back another day [the second coming of Christ]. We can put it in a frame [to remember him], so he’ll come back another day. Now, everyone’s forgetting about him. So someone will do another painting. Many people don’t really know God, so he just fades away from them [like the damaged painting]. It’s painted on wood, because Jesus died on the wood of the cross.

This has been a momentous piece of theological work from the boys. They have moved between metaphor (we can’t see all of God; Jesus fades away from us; the wood of the painting suffers); Christian creedal teaching (Christ was damaged for our sins); and the metaphysics of a piece of wood with paint on it (the painting will slowly disappear; someone will do another painting and Christ will become real again). They have drawn this theology together seamlessly, with humour and religious imagination fully engaged, and fully aware of what they were doing and saying. Together, they have filled in the missing gaps in the icon and painted a picture of humankind, created, fallen and redeemed, made in the image of Christ who is made in the image of God, timeless and eternal. In terms of an integrated spirituality, their religious imagination has recruited their aesthetic sensitivities, a moral awareness of the consequences of human actions, sustained, focused thought processes, and co-​operative team work and respect among peers. For Deps, who initiated this conversation, the gaze of the Christ appears to have given him strength; examining the DVDs of this session afterwards, I  was struck by the dynamic between Deps and the image of the Christ, and the words of the apostle Paul came to mind: ‘For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face’ (1 Cor. 13.12). Whatever had occurred as Deps and Christ ‘eyeballed’ each other, he had found the courage to ‘stand tall’ against his natural inclination. In addition, aided by the aesthetics of a damaged icon, the boys have instinctively and perceptively recited some of the deepest theology of this icon,

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and the role in Christian history of the ‘original’ icon of Christ, known as the Mandylion.15 The term ‘Mandylion’ –​from the Greek word for ‘cloth’ –​is the traditional title for the type of icon which portrays only the face and head of Christ. Orthodox tradition records that, during his ministry, Jesus received a message from King Abgar (one of the ruling dynasties of the northern city of Edessa, as recorded by the historian Eusebius) and in return Jesus sent him a painting or cloth, bearing the image of his face.16 In Orthodox liturgical practice and theology, an icon is regarded as a physical link with an unseen, spiritual presence; it is the ‘window’ through which the object of devotion –​the actual Christ –​is revealed and encountered, and we are called upon to look beyond the paint and encounter the spiritual reality. This is not only the case for icons in general, but the Mandylion in particular holds the role in Orthodox theology as the justification for all icons: Christ, who was the visible Image of the Invisible God, gave this physical image to be an ongoing reminder of his incarnation, and of the sanctity of all matter. From the Mandylion onwards, all icons have formed a chain of representation, going back to their prototype, the Christ. Hence, the boys –​presumably with no knowledge of orthodox theology –​stated that ‘we know He exists because of the picture’. In discussing the Mandylion, Russian Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky comments that the ‘eyes of . . . faith’ enable the true believer to appreciate the deeper mysteries of this icon.17 This group of fourteen-​year-​old believers have looked with their own eyes and seen not only the face of Christ, but also the thin veil that separates the material from the immaterial. Despite the vast gap in age, time and geography between the artist, a medieval Russian monk, and a group of Pasefika boys in the twenty-​first century, the boys were still able to engage with this icon with their hearts, souls, minds and strength. Moreover, it was the age of the icon itself that had spoken to the boys. Perhaps the power of such ancient works of art lies precisely in their age, a combination of timelessness and transcendence, whereby the passing on of human and divine stories promotes feelings of awe and wonder, as well as identification and connection with a much-​loved tradition. In addition, the damage and deterioration of this icon conveyed to these boys a profound sense of beauty and the beauteousness of the Divine, in a way that brings humanity in all its brokenness and with all its limitations before the face of God. These boys had seen the brokenness of the icon, equated it, in part, with the sinful

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destruction by humankind, and gained an increased sense of the holy as a result; a consciousness of Christ’s presence, yearning for us, in the midst of brokenness. The boys’ awareness of the imperfections and hypocrisies of the world in which they live had been played out within this painting: it, along with Christ on the wood of the cross, had been ‘whooped’.

Conclusions In the opening paragraphs of this chapter, I asked what it was that so grasped these young men, inspiring them to seize ownership of these conversations; and why did I import foreign images when their own cultural art forms are so rich and laden with meaning? The answer lies in part with the capacity of art from any culture to transcend cultural and societal difference, but particularly, and in these episodes described here, with figurative art. It was noticeable that much of the art which drew forth enactment was portraiture. This genre of art had been intentionally featured at several points in the research, as portraiture enables the artist to emphasize human emotion and response. Christ (or whoever) would be in the room, personified in the art. For the boys, a male presence would be depicted, undergoing intense experiences before their eyes. As has been demonstrated in this chapter, the strong, evocative nature of these paintings not only enabled a deeply personal verbal response from these particular boys, but their empathetic engagement drew forth a degree of embodied response as powerful as it was unexpected. Also at the start of this chapter, I described the ways in which the spiritual traditions of Jewish, Christian, western European, Māori and Pasefika peoples spoke in similar and parallel ways about the holistic nature of human well-​ being. This formed the basis for the theoretical foundations of the research, and shaped the structure of the field research with the boys. In the three episodes I have detailed here, we can see the coming together of theory and practice. Peter’s Denial highlights a bodily response which, at the same time, draws together emotion and meaning. Christ in the Wilderness underlines the way art engages our moral capacities to consider questions of good and evil. Christ the Saviour emphasizes the bridging of time and space as the voices of art speak to us across oceans and centuries. But something more profound is

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occurring here, and that is the way these fourteen-​year-​olds bring their entire selves –​heart, soul, body and mind –​into the circle of the conversation. Each in turn might give cause for comment. Yet these conversations reveal an interconnectedness that sits at the core of well-​being. In other conversations with other art works, these same boys invoked their struggles as families and as a people to survive the forces of tsunami, of South Auckland unemployment, of Pasefika homelands being bought up by developers. Those episodes illustrate more obviously the social, cultural, global and spiritual dimensions which were evoked in these conversations and were equally fused. Those stories will have to wait for another time. But here, in these three conversations, we catch a glimpse of the integrated, holistic force that arises when visual art and human lives come together. It has been a privilege to be part of this, and a privilege to pass it on to other readers.

Notes 1. In New Zealand, the English term ‘Pacific’ can be rendered as ‘Pacifica’, ‘Pasefika’, ‘Pasifika’ or other variants. In this chapter, I use the spelling preferred by my context of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa New Zealand and Polynesia: ‘Pasefika’. 2. The designation ‘Pākehā’ denotes non-​Māori, predominantly of European ethnicity. Likewise, in a predominantly Pasefika context, the Samoan term ‘Palagi’ (pronounced Palangi) refers to non-​Pasefika people. 3. The complete research project included a separate group of Pākehā/​Palagi girls. In this chapter, I have chosen to focus on the boys’ group and some of the issues specific to their participation. A full account of this research project can be found in Jacky Sewell, ‘From Sight to Insight: God, Art and the Spiritual Well-​being of the Teenager’ (PhD diss., University of Otago, 2014). See especially pp. 6–​7 and 106–​10 for details on the selection process of participants. 4. Mason Durie, Whaiora: Maori Health Development (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1994), 70; cited in Ministry of Education, The New Zealand Curriculum (Wellington: Learning Media Ltd, 2007), 22; Ministry of Education, Health and Physical Education in the New Zealand Curriculum (Wellington: Learning Media Ltd, 1999), 31. 5. Michael P. Shirres, Te Tangata: The Human Person (Auckland: Accent Publishers, 1997), 18. 6. Ibid., 53.

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7. ‘Ana Koloto, ‘A Tongan Perspective on Development’, in Human Development in Aotearoa, ed. Wendy Drewery and Lise Bird (Auckland: McGraw-​Hill, 2004), 61–​2. 8. John W. Fisher, ‘Spiritual Health: Its Nature and Place in the School Curriculum’ (PhD diss., University of Melbourne, 1998), 24, esp. table 2.2. 9. While it would have been equally valid to have shaped the field research around the more contextually localized Māori or Pasefika perceptions of holistic spirituality as described by Durie, Shirres or Koloto, I chose to shape the research and subsequent analysis around the model from my own Pākehā /​ Palagi cultural heritage. Where Fisher described Communal, Personal, Environmental and Transcendental domains, these were redefined for a young cohort (and in line with the Christian text) as Neighbour, Self, World and God. 10. For a full account, see Sewell, ‘From Sight to Insight’, 217–​19. 11. Tevita Tonga Mohenoa Puloka, ‘Hermeneutics Is Body, Mind and Heart Dancing the Haka’, Pacific Journal of Theology 2, no. 46 (2011): 5–​6. 12. Ibid., 6. See also Tavita Maliko, ‘O Le Soga’imiti: An Embodiment of God in the Samoan Male Body’ (PhD diss., University of Auckland, 2012), 21–​6. 13. Mark Halstead, ‘How Metaphors Structure Our Spiritual Understanding’, in Spiritual Education: Literary, Empirical and Pedagogical Approaches, ed. Cathy Ota and Clive Erricker (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), 143. 14. James Fowler, Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning (New York: HarperCollins, 1981), 149–​50. 15. Rublev’s icon is most likely the remnant of a Pantocrator-​type icon wherein Christ is portrayed from the waist up in an act of blessing, rather than a true Mandylion. However, much of the Mandylion Christology could be said to apply to a fragment such as this, which now reveals only the face. 16. This tradition was first recorded in The Teaching of Addai, a Syriac-​Christian text dated to the late fourth century. According to Eusebius, Addai was an apostle from Edessa, one of Christ’s seventy disciples. An English translation of The Teachings of Addai can be found at The Tertullian Project, available online: http://​www.tertullian.org/​fathers/​addai_​2_​text.htm. 17. Vladimir Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, ed. Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky, rev. ed. (New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989), 69.

Bibliography Durie, Mason. Whaiora: Maori Health Development. Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1994.

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Fisher, John W. ‘Spiritual Health: Its Nature and Place in the School Curriculum’. PhD diss., University of Melbourne, 1998. Fowler, James. Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning. New York: HarperCollins, 1981. Halstead, Mark. ‘How Metaphors Structure Our Spiritual Understanding’. In Spiritual Education: Literary, Empirical and Pedagogical Approaches, edited by Cathy Ota and Clive Erricker, 137–​53. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005. Koloto, ‘Ana. ‘A Tongan Perspective on Development’. In Human Development in Aotearoa, edited by Wendy Drewery and Lise Bird, 61–​5. Auckland: McGraw-​Hill, 2004. Lossky, Vladimir. ‘Icons of Christ’. In The Meaning of Icons, edited by Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky, 69. New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989. Maliko, Tavita. ‘O Le Soga’imiti: An Embodiment of God in the Samoan Male Body’. PhD diss., University of Auckland, 2012. Ministry of Education. Health and Physical Education in the New Zealand Curriculum. Wellington: Learning Media Ltd, 1999. Ministry of Education. The New Zealand Curriculum. Wellington: Learning Media Ltd, 2007. Puloka, Tevita Tonga Mohenoa. ‘Hermeneutics Is Body, Mind and Heart Dancing the Haka’. Pacific Journal of Theology 2, no. 46 (2011): 4–​18. Sewell, Jacky. ‘From Sight to Insight: God, Art and the Spiritual Well-​Being of the Teenager’. PhD diss., University of Otago, 2014. Shirres, Michael P. Te Tangata: The Human Person. Auckland: Accent Publishers, 1997.

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Biblical Reference Index HEBREW BIBLE Genesis 1−3 6, 227 1 5, 89, 147–50, 199 1−2 144 1.1–​2.4a 4, 98, 105, 107, 111, 112 1.1 105, 109, 111, 198 1.2–​3 109 1.2 79, 105, 112, 148 1.3 105, 108, 150 1.4 108 1.6–​27 149 1.6 107, 108 1.9 107, 108 1.10 107, 108 1.11 108 1.12 108, 199 1.14–​19 154 1.14–​18 107 1.14 107, 108 1.18 108 1.20–​5 108 1.20–​3 108 1.20 199 1.21 108 1.24–​5 108 1.24 107, 108, 198, 228 1.25 108 1.26–​8 198 1.26 107, 108, 152, 199, 231 1.27 115 n.25, 151, 196, 199 1.28–​9 108 1.28 108, 155 1.29 108 1.31 108 2−3 1, 157, 199 2 148, 231 2.1 105, 111 2.2–​3 109 2.5 198

2.7–​8 228 2.7 112, 153 2.9 151, 157 2.15 198 2.18–​20 231 2.18 5 2.19 152, 228 3.7 230, 232 3.12 156 3.17–​19 198 3.22–​4 156, 258 4.15 6 4 79, 189, 196 4.2 197, 198 4.3 197, 198 4.4 198 4.9 197 4.10–​16 258 4.10 197 4.11 197 4.12 197 4.15 197 5.1–​24 79 11.1–​9 258 11.31–​2 259 12.1–​9 258 12.1 259 12.7 259 12.8 84 13.14–​17 259 13.14 259 15.18–​21 259 17.8 266, 269 Exodus 3.1–​6 84 9.29 258 13.21 40 14.24 25 n.29 15.20–​21 136 20.4 64 32 1

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296 Leviticus 1.15 196 5.8 196 19.28 188 Deuteronomy 1.19 272 n.43 1.31 272 n.43 1.33 272 n.43 2.7 272 n.43 5.8 64 10.14 258 11.10–​12 258 Judges 5.28 25 n.29 1 Samuel 3.1–​18 84 2 Samuel 6.16 25 n.29 2 Kings 9.30 25 n.29 Isaiah 7.14 246 40.3 266 55.4 37 Jeremiah 1.1 16 2.15 21, 26 n.31 4.5–​6 25 n.28 4.7 21, 26 n.31 4.19 25 n.28 4.20 20 4.21 25 n.28 4.23 20 6.1–​8 3, 17, 18, 20 6.1 16, 18 6.2 19 6.3 17, 19 6.4 18 6.6 21 6.8 19 6.17 25 n.28

Biblical Reference Index 6.23 20 6.25 20 6.26 48 7.20 21 7.34 26 n.31 8.16 26 n.31 9.11 21 11.21 16, 23 11.23 16 25.11–​12 20 25.38 20 26.9 21 27.6 25 n.26 27.8 25 n.26 27.20 25 n.26 28.3 25 n.26 28.11 25 n.26 29.1 25 n.26 29.3 25 n.26 29.27 16 31.1 20 31.5 20 32.6–​15 16 32.9 21 33.12 20 34.22 21 44.2 21 44.6 20 44.22 20 47.2 26 n.31 51.43 26 n.31 52.4 20 Jonah 3.5 48 Micah 6.15 196 Psalms 14.2 25 n.29 22 254 n.22 24.1 258 53.2 25 n.29 102.19 25 n.29 106.24–​39 258 130 39 137 18

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Biblical Reference Index Proverbs 1−9 1 7.6 25 n.29 24.3–​4 49 Job 38−41 1 41.11 258 Lamentations 2.10 48 3.50 25 n.29 1 Chronicles 15.29 25 n.29 APOCRYPHA OR DEUTERO-CANONICAL BOOKS Susanna 7−21 209 NEW TESTAMENT Matthew 1.18–​23 250 1.18 243 1.20 243 1.23 246, 250 16.24 88 16.4 197 26.47–​50 210 26.75 280 27.26 249 27.28 249 27.31 249 27.42–​3 249 27.44 249 27.45 250 27.50 249, 250, 251 Mark 1.3 266 12.28–​34 277 12.31 277 14.43–​5 210 Luke 1.66 173

2.19 164 2.22–​35 164, 165, 179 2.22–​24 164 2.36–​8 164 2.51 164 3.17 173 4.1–​13 283 4.11 173 4.23 37 4.40 172 5.1–​11 131 5.13 172, 173 6.1 173 6.6–​11 173 6.19 173 6.20–​6 173 7.11–​17 176 7.12 176 7.13–​14 177 7.13 176 7.14 173, 176, 177 7.16 176 7.36–​50 176 7.39 173, 176 7.40–​7 174 7.44–​7 174 7.44 176 8 173, 174 8.44–​7 173 8.46 173, 174 8.54 172 9.44 172 10.25–​37 135, 176 10.30 177 10.34 177 10.31 176 10.32 176 10.33–​4 177 10.33 176 10.34 176 13.12–​13 177 13.13 172 13.24 87 15.11–​32 126, 176 15.11–​19 172 15.20 176, 177 15.24 177 18.15 173

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298 18.33 173 19.41 176 19.42 176 19.43–​4 176 19.44 176 20.19 172 21.12 172 21.30–​1 176 22.21 173 22.19 92 22.50 173 22.53 172 22.63 173 22.64 173 23.5 269 23.16 173 23.22 173 23.46 173 24.7 172 24.32 174, 175 24.39–​4 173 24.50 173 John 1.1 36 1.23 266 15.4 83 15.5 87 17.12 37 20.24–​9 210 Acts 2.1–​4 79 2.2 79 6.6 172 8.17 172 8.19 172 9.17 172 13.3 172 19.6 172

Biblical Reference Index 17.28 51 28.8 172 1 Corinthians 10.26 258 12 92 12.14–​21 82 12.26 82 13.12 289 13.13 216 Ephesians 2.11–​22 77, 83 2.16–​22 83 2.18 78 Colossians 1.16 81 1.20 81 1.22 45 Philemon 4.3 47 Hebrews 11 33 11.6 33 11.8 267 Revelation 3.5 47 13.8 47 17.8 47 20.12–​15 47 20.12 47 20.15 47 21.1–​2 264 21.6 50 21.27 47

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Author Index Addo, P.-​A. 114 Adorno, T. 8, 55–7, 58, 63–4, 66, 67, 68, 69 Alaimo, S. 251, 252, 254 Allen, G. 18 Allison, E. C. 53 Alter, R. 238 Arnold, R. 261, 272 Austin-​Broos, D. 166, 180, 181 Bal, M. 1, 8 Barthes, R. 12, 13, 24, 25 Beattie, J. 271, 272 Beckett, J. 166, 180 Begbie, J. 73, 93 Bell, C. 25 Ben-​Porat, Z. 13, 15, 25 Berdini, P. 143, 159 Berry, J. 68–9 Besnier, N. 114 Billings, D. K. 114 Bishop-​Jahnke, S. 53 Bloem, M. 53 Boer, R. 69, 166, 180, 181 Boni, F. 68 Brett, M. 166, 180, 181 Brewster, A. 167, 181 Brown, David 143, 159, 270, 272 Brown, Deirdre 52, 53 Brown, G. 140, 224 Browne, M. 53 Brueggemann, W. 258, 259, 265, 271, 272 Brunt, P. 200 Buck-​Morss, S. 68 Burke, G. 271 Burramurra, D. 166, 178, 181 Byrne, B. 183 Calarco, M. 238 Carpenter, E. 53 Caughey, E. 224 Chrétien, J.-​L. 183 Cixous, H. 6, 235, 236, 237, 239

Colgan, E. 26 Cotton, C. A. 272 Croft, B. 165, 169, 180, 182 Crumlin, R. 244, 247, 248, 253 Culler, J. 24 Davis, J. G. 93 Deger, J. 165, 180, 183 Derrida, J. 6, 173, 174, 175, 182, 183, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239 Desmond, M. 171, 182 Diprose, R. 175, 183 Dobbs-​Allsopp, F. W. 26 Donne, J. 183 Dunn, M. 140 Durie, M. 146, 159, 276, 292 Durkin, J. 114 Edwards, D. 171 Edwards, K. B. 8 Eggleton, D. 52, 53 Ellis, J. 201 Ellis, S. 223 Elvey, A. 179, 183, 243, 253 Exum, J. C. 2, 8 Fairburn, A. R. D. 263, 272 Ferguson, G. 52 Fisher, A. 171, 173, 177, 182, 183 Fisher, J. 278, 293 Foster, W. 83 Fowler, J. 285, 293 Galambush, J. 26 Gardner, A. 171, 182 Geraghty, P. 114 Gifford, A. 52 Gilbert, S. 188, 189, 199, 200 Gilliam-​Knight, D. 93, 94 Goh, I. 235, 236, 239 Goldingay, J. 271, 272

300

300 Govor, E. 199 Gow, J. 224 Grijp, P. van der 113 Grisanti, M. A. 53 n Grishin, A. 140 n.13 Guerlac, S. 238 Halstead, M. 293 Haraway, D. 250, 254 Hart, K. 247, 248, 253 Harvey, J. 8 n.3 Havea, J. 113, 200, 201 Herda, P. 113 n.4 Higgins, R. 159 n.7 Horkheimer, M. 56, 68 n.4, 69 n.24 Huggett, J. 140 n.20 Iovino, S. 252, 253 Ireland, K. 223 Jackson, P. 224 Jameson, N. 70 n.25 Jenson. R. 90, 94 n.31 Johnson, Alexa 263, 273 Johnson, Anna 63, 69 n.21 Johnson, E. 251, 254 Jones, J. 171, 182 Joynes, C. 8 n.3 Jung, C. 67, 70 n.26 Ka’ili, T.‘O. 114, 194, 195, 199, 201 Khamis, S. 68 n.8 Koloto, ‘A. 277, 293 Kristeva, J. 12, 24 Lacoque, A. 230, 238 Leonard, R. 272 Lossky, V. 290, 293 Lukács, G. 57, 68 n.6 Luz, R. 14, 114 nn.13 McCahon, C. 272 McCahon, W. 272 McFague, S. 5, 159 nn.4 McIntosh, I. 167, 181 McKenzie, J. 69 n.11 McLean, B. 177 McNaughton, T. 271, 272 Magowan, F. 181 Māhina, ‘O. 114 n.18

Author Index Maliko. T. 200, 293 Mallon, S. 200 Mane-​Wheoki, J. 52 n.2 Marx, K. 57, 68 n.7 Mendoza, M. B. 249, 254 Mifflin, M. 188, 200 Milburn, F. 52 n.5 Moore, C. 52 n.7 Morgan, M. 168, 178, 181 Morton, T. 248, 252, 253 Mundine, D. 164, 171, 180, 182 Nägele, R. 242, 245, 253 Nancy, J.-​L. 5, 165, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183 Neich, R. 81, 93 n.20 Noonuccal, O. 167, 251, 254 Nutu, E. 2, 8 n.2 O’Brien, G. 43, 53 n.22 O’Grady, R. 140 n.19 O’Kane, M. 8 n.3 Oppermann, S. 252, 253 Orr, M. 25 n.13 Palu, V. 113 n.9 Papasterigiadis, N. 182 Parish, S. 69 n.12 Puloka, T. T. M. 283, 293 Purdy, M. 4, 93 nn.3 Rankin, E. 20, 24 n.1, 25 n.24, 26 n.34, 27 nn.36, 39 Reid, B. E. 183 Richards, K. 69 n.19 Riffaterre, M. 14, 25 n.15 Rigby, K. 245, 246, 252, 253, 254 Riley, M. 177, 183 Robb, L. 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 93 nn.8, 94 n.23 Roberts, D. A. 181 Roddy, N. 26 n.31 Rose, D. B. 166, 180 Rowe, N. 272 Royal, T. A. C. 94 n.21 Runesson, A. 253 Salevao, I. 201 Scarlett, K. 140 Schaberg, J. 243, 245, 253

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Author Index Sewell, J. 292 Shaw, P. 244 Shirres, M. 277, 292 Simmons, L. 224 Skye, L. M. 168–9, 172, 181, 182, 183 Stenhouse, J. 271, 272 Stewart, K. 224 Strongman, L. 13, 34, 43, 52 nn.12, 53 Sykes, R. 242, 252 Takenaka, M. 140 n.19 Te Kanawa, K. 159 n.13 Threkeld, L. E. 181 Tipa, M. 52 n.6 Vaka’uta, N. 113 n.6 Vercoe, C. 191, 200

Veys, F. W. 113 Voelz, J. W. 242, 253 Walden, R. 6, 25, 26, 28, 33, 34, 85, 92, 93 nn.5, 94 nn.24 Waldron, M. 68 n.8, 69 Walker, K. 251 Walker, R. 155, 159 Watson, B. 164, 180, 183 Wedde, I. 271 Weissenrieder, A. 183 Wendt, A. 191, 201 Westermann, C. 271, 272 White, J. 200 Williams, R. 73, 93 n.1 Witkin, R. 69 n.15 Woodward, R. 223, 224

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