Tawhai Rickard: Wild Card

Tawhai Rickard (Ngāti Uepohatu, Ngāti Porou) confronts the past head-on, remixing history into bold, politically charged visual narratives that blend the aesthetics of Pop Art with the naïvely painted and traditionally carved histories in and on his ancestral meeting house, Hinetapora at Mangahanea marae, Ruatoria, in the northeastern corner of Aotearoa New Zealand’s North Island. The works are instantly recognisable: vivid sculptural paintings thumbing their nose at European aesthetic traditions, restaging colonial history as absurdist tableaux in elaborate aedicular shrines that recall Māori architectural heritage as much as classical tradition.

Rickard was born at Tūranganui-a-Kiwa, Gisborne and completed his art studies at Waiāriki Institute of Technology, Rotorua and Massey University Te Putahi a Toi, in Palmerston North. He grew up in the bosom of his ancestral lands, absorbing the traditions of his whanau (extended family) and iwi (tribe). Much of his childhood was spent in the discovery of taha wairua Māori (spiritual wellbeing) through encounters with his tribal maunga (mountain) Hikurangi, his whenua papatipu (ancestral lands), and the cultural expressions of his whanau and iwi…