“Te Arawa te waka. Tarawera me Tongariro me Tauhara te maunga. Tarawera me Rotorua me Taupo te moana. Ngāti Whakaue me Ngāti Tūwharetoa te iwi. Ngāti Tūhourangi me Ngāti Hurunga Te Rangi te hapu. Oruanui me Wahiao me Hurunga Te Rangi te marae. Ko Peata tōku ingoa.”
In more than one case, family breakdown or late-colonial bureaucracy put them in the care of a Pākeha parent. That’s not to say they were loved any less, but a core part of their identity feels like it was yeeted out from under them and left, tantalisingly, just out of reach. That is true for Peata Larkin (Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Tūhourangi), raised in Rotorua by her English-born father on the DPB. Consolidating those complexities has underpinned much of her practice, as she reconnected to those lineages of knowledge.
“I always felt lost growing up, as I just didn’t seem to fit in,” says the artist. “I was ‘too white’ to be Māori, but ‘too brown’ to be Pākehā, so it was a very confusing time for me right through to my twenties. It wasn’t until I was hapū with my daughter Alexandra that the yearning to learn more about my Māori and English heritages became so strong I couldn’t ignore it any longer, because how could my daughter know who she is if I didn’t know who I was?”
“I had a difficult time finding out about my whakapapa,” says Larkin. “I didn’t have a good relationship with my mother, and my aunties and uncles would say that Mum should be telling me about our history. But the reality was that no one was passing anything on in the early days. From my perspective, my mother and all her siblings were the result of a generation who were not allowed to speak Māori, let alone feel proud to be Māori, so it took many years to learn our history.”
Larkin’s distinctive style of abstraction recalls tukutuku, raranga, gene maps, pixels, digital patterns – all ways of encoding information and knowledge. The touchstone of tikanga is still there. The goddess Hineteiwaiwa reigns over te whare pora, the house of weaving. She is also the goddess of childbirth and the knowledge passed down through the female line.
“My oeuvre to date is a visual timeline of these learnings, as well as personal perspectives and events that have happened in my life,” says Larkin. “One of the most significant works are my two I am Tūhourangi diptychs. I created these large works after finding out my ancestors were the kaitiaki of the Pink and White Terraces and presided around Lake Tarawera and Lake Rotoiti before the Tarawera Eruption in 1886.”
She fell in love with abstraction while studying at Elam School of Fine Arts in Tāmaki Makaurau in the early 2000s – a fascination reinforced by visits to New York and Europe in 2004. “I saw so many incredible artworks that changed my life forever,” she recalls. “My favourites were Bridget Riley, Agnes Martin, Sol LeWitt and Lucio Fontana. These artists became the inspiration for my own artistic processes.”
Larkin was particularly moved by an exhibition of Riley’s work in Wellington in 2004. “My heart burst as I stood in front of her incredible paintings, especially the larger canvases that pulsated through me. I was mesmerised!” The repetition intrigued her, but it was the way geometric patterns could stir up emotion that stuck. Martin’s contemplative sensibility and ability to evoke calmness was also an influence, as were Lewitt’s sculptures and Fontana’s slashed canvases.
“I suppose all these artists have shaped my way of creating in one way or another. The repetition of pattern, rhythm, contemplation and feminising the grid felt through Riley and Martin, the conceptual and aesthetic elements of LeWitt’s structures, and Fontana changing the ‘space’ of painting are integral to how I create.”
On a deeper, even more significant level is the rauru (cord) connecting Larkin to the ringatoi (artists) who paved the way for a new generation: Robyn Kahukiwa, Kura Te Waru Rewiri, Ralph Hotere, Lyonel Grant, Sandy Adsett, Fred Graham and Bob Jahnke among many others, but also contemporary Māori artists such as Julie Paama-Pengelly, Kereama Taepa, Brett Graham and the Mataaho Collective.
“I spent so many years being ashamed of being Māori because of the conditioning growing up, and I felt so lost and frustrated that I didn’t fit in anywhere,” says Larkin. “It wasn’t until I learned more about my tīpuna and started creating our history – personal and historical – through my paintings that I finally felt like I had a place in this world. There is a lot of pent-up trauma there still, but I thank my tīpuna for giving me a creative space in order to heal.”
Larkin developed the sculptural quality of her paintings early on at art school, creating Lewitt-esque structures, painting with mixed concrete. Eventually, she came across a mesh material being used by a friend. “I was a bit rude and asked her if I could have some to play with,” says Larkin. “She kindly gave me the whole lot! From there, I started to paint on an open grid (the mesh) where I’d create the foundation or ground, leaving open spaces where I’d then push the paint through. I then started to paint on tapestry and embroidery canvases. In my final year, I went back to canvas and created cutouts all over the surface and painted on the surface and pushed paint through it as well.”
These mesh works formed the basis of much of Larkin’s early career, reinventing the modernist grid with an eye on traditional Māori motifs. Larkin’s painting practice continued to evolve during her MFA through Melbourne’s RMIT. It was around this time that she began exploring lightboxes as a kind of painting. The mesh works continued to develop, the surface becoming finer as the artist paints on and through embroidered silk.
The freshness of Larkin’s work led to public commissions – an enormous lightbox in Tāmaki Makaurau’s ANZ tower, a work in Spanish tiles on the side of the NZICC building, and a truly epic lightbox work in the foyer of the Park Hyatt Auckland. For Larkin, represented by Two Rooms Gallery in Grey Lynn, the future looks just as bright.
Peata Larkin
Two Rooms, 16 Putiki Street, Grey Lynn, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
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