When the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art opens at the Queensland Art Gallery in December gleaming white gallery walls will be the back-drop for a collaborative artwork newly completed by Robin White and two other artists. But ‘Teitei Vou’ (‘New Garden’) was actually completed amid waving tropical palms in a home in Lautoka, Fiji, side by side with friends Leba Toki and Bale Jone.
Masterton-based Dame Robin White is a senior New Zealand artist with a career spanning over 40 years. Her large oil Summer Grass, based on the experience of the Japanese prisoners at Featherston during World War II, is now in the Aratoi collection, and she is perhaps best known for her linear New Zealand landscapes and portraits, including Mangaweka, and Sam Hunt Bottle Creek, painted in the 1970s.
Her life and art became deeply entwined with the Pacific after she moved to Kiribati with her family in the 1980s, staying 17 years before settling in Masterton to be close to the daughter of a Kiribati family. “It was good coming back to a relatively small town,” she says of Masterton.
‘New Garden’ is the result of several trips to Fiji and months of collaboration with Leba and Toki. The resulting ‘installation’ comprises six hand made objects that would traditionally be created for a Fijian wedding, including a spectacular stencilled backdrop masi measuring 12ft X 8 ft, and a woven and embroidered pandanas mat on which the bride and groom traditionally stand (8ft X 6ft).
The theme is “looking at the idea of a marriage of cultures, presenting what we believe is the potential for a harmonious society,” says White. “It was the opportunity to say something current.”
Long experience in the Pacific has taught her that, despite raging political divisions as in Fiji today, diverse cultures can and do co-exist peacefully: “All Fijian women make roti, for example, and Leba herself lives next door to an Indian family, their children grew up together.”
In fact, the co-operative way that ‘New Garden’ evolved illustrates perfectly Robin White’s hopes for Fijian society and the wider world. Working side by side on the floor of Leba’s house, she learnt the ancient processes of making and stencilling masi, the Fijian version of tapa cloth. She designed and cut stencils from x-ray film recycled from the local hospital, and dyes were made in the traditional way from hardened clay and the soot of masi (mangrove root) burnt in kerosene.
“The final work is a combination of traditional Fijian tapa patterns, and patterns and symbols that relate to Indian traditional designs,” she says. Her own imagery, derived from her Ngati Awa and Pakeha background, is also part of the blend.
“It was interesting to find out how much common ground we had in terms of aesthetics,” she says of working with Leba and Bale. “Patterning in Maori art is also based on negative and positive, light and dark being brought into harmony.”
The central image of the installation is of the Bahá’í World Centre at Mt Carmel in Haifa, Israel, and its terraced gardens. This holds great significance for the three women who all follow the Bahá’í faith, with its vision of unity across all religions. In her imagined garden, Robin White used the Chelsea sugar branding to point to the appalling hardships suffered by Indian indentured workers on Fiji’s sugar plantations. Alongside are kumara leaves, a traditional crop.
‘New Garden’ will surely resonate with other artists at the Triennial where many countries are represented: Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, Kashmir, Pakistan, West Asia and the Middle East. “These artists are also exploring issues of social and spiritual concern….These are people with something to say.”
Asked whether she would ever move back to the islands, Robin White says: “I keep an open mind on that. I sort of feel borderless …I’m in such a different place from when I was painting Mangaweka!”
Of ‘New Garden’, which may go to an Australian public collection after the Triennial, she says: “It has a job to do now…it’s like having children. I like the idea of this going out into the world.”
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