Home Front is Michael Parekowhai’s largest single installation to date. It is comprised of two sculptures, each 23 metres in length, which can be shown butted together or separated to form a wall or enclosure. The works appear to be made of giant Cuisenaire rods beautifully stacked floor to ceiling to create a structure of highly polished and distinctive colours.

Cuisenaire rods were created by Belgian teacher Georges Cuisenaire in the 1920s as an aid for learning mathematics, with the length and colour of each rod corresponding to a number between one and ten. They were widely used for this purpose throughout the world in the 1960s and 70s. In New Zealand, since 1979, Maori educators have used the rods to teach Te Reo Maori with much success. Parekowhai first used Cuisinaire rods in a sculpture called Atarangi in 1990, titled after this immersive, conversation-based teaching method that focuses solely on Maori as a spoken language. As in many of his works, Parekowhai’s Cuisenaires position both European and Maori cultural narratives in close relationship in order to play out their complexities. They refer to a social, communicative realm, where the flow of ideas and systems runs between cultures; and to childhood, a time of formative experiences and memories. The teaching rods are also suggestive of the artist’s own biography, with Parekowhai being the son of two teachers.

When curator and writer Robert Leonard asked Parekowhai about the larger scale of the rods in Atarangi, the artist noted that he ‘liked the idea of bigger blocks which children could not manage on their own, so that they would have to learn to be cooperative. Different sized blocks entail different social relations’.¹ Since Atarangi, Parekowhai has further scaled up the rods, made them in different materials, put them outdoors, stacked them into walls, transformed them into a fountain and remade them as elements in architectural facades — most recently in ‘The Far Side’ exhibition in 2011, held at Michael Lett Gallery after the artist’s Venice Biennale acclaim. Speaking about this artwork, New Zealand art critic John Hurrell said: ‘. . . it is his best, most rigorous work ever’.²

Around the world, narratives of war, death and enemy threats have historically led to nationalist fervour, the proclamation of shared values and histories. Through remembrance, nations collectively recall and re-create their purpose and identity. Through his artworks, Parekowhai suggests that such narratives are not dissimilar to those of religion. Each of these is prevalent subject matter in his practice, through the lens of the narratives of his home country. ‘The consolation of philosophy — Piko nei te matenga’, his 2001 photographic series in which the works are named for World War One battlefields where soldiers from the Maori Pioneer Battalion fought and died (see Boulogne, Calais and Le Quesnoy in the Collection) and the infantry-like sculptural steel trolleys of The Salvation Army 1992 (private collection) are examples.

Primarily a feminine-gendered space, the home front represents the many women contributing to the war effort as well as being an imagined space of comfort for soldiers far from their families. It also denotes the support provided to the armed forces by their countries. Divided or joined, Home Front’s large, gleaming walls refer to these complex relationships in a simple yet epic sculptural form, befitting the significance and impact of the narratives it draws on. In the 2015 exhibition ‘Michael Parekowhai: The Promised Land’ at GOMA, Home Front was a monumental threshold through which visitors entered and exited a series of domestically scaled rooms, where the artist had arranged works from his 26-year-long practice — performing a memory palace writ large.

Endnotes

1. Robert Leonard, ‘Michael Parekowhai: Against purity’, Art New Zealand, no.59, 1991, p.54.
2. Jim Hurrell, ‘Colourful and conceptually complex Parekowhai’, EyeContact, 20 October 2011, viewed 12 March 2015.