Exchange for a Musket

I’ll give you this tiki, this greenstone ear ornament and two huia feathers for your musket. I will give you priceless treasure, wrought from the land I love, handed to me by my ancestors and plucked from a bird that no longer sings – for your musket.

Alexis Neal looks back with high intensity in Exchange for a Musket. She is pulling on generic memory, reminding us that the past is still relevant. Look at what was lost, in exchange for trouble; what was lost in exchange for more loss.

It’s an emotional story, dense with nostalgia and wistful sentiment – but beauty, tenderness and insight are woven into the narrative, softening it. Sighs, not angry shouts, blow through the work.

Neal writes ‘Aotearoa, land of the long white cloud’ across the image of a native bird, guns crossed menacingly across it and silver ferns delivering a soft, nest-like promise. How did it ever seem like a good plan to swap that priceless, tender creature for weapons of inevitable sorrow?  This work has echoes of the modern rebel flag, the gang patch. Old, scratched and over-handled…it has history, it holds history, it is history.

In her Marereko series of drawings, the true nature of the treasure is brutally laid out. The most drastic of exchanges has been made. They’re terribly sad, these drawings of pieces of bird. They’re sad and they’re honest and, thanks to the care and respect of the artist’s hand, they are also memories honoured.

And in the process of honouring the past, Neal reaches forward to now, to where she stands today. The delicate, poetic Reminiscent and Taonga are collections of memories revealed with such tender rendering that the artist presents more treasures, more memories. If skulls, beaks and bones are symbolic of the fragile past, the prints and drawings of them will become symbols of the fragile present – of the shape that the present can take, when confronted with the past.

Two dry point etchings on paper shaped to hint at bone – Guardian and Across the Shaw – are dream-scapes, scenes caught in sepia from another time, traced into weathered, slightly naïvely-handled recordings…this is how it looked, this is where we sat and watched over.

How does she know these things? How does she conjure the look of the woman wrapped in a blanket and clutching a musket in Portrait with Huia? It’s a self-portrait. She’s remembering. Wahine Toa is also of the artist, wearing feathers, greenstone, standing with her back to us, oblivious. She is deep in thought and perhaps she is wondering - does this culture fit me? Does this identity fit my face?

Is this personal history, or social history, or is it both?

One of the glorious things about Alexis Neal’s work is that it harbours layers. You can love the texture, the detail and the delicate crafting, or find the poetry and contemplate the mysteries. It is social and personal, cultural and human. It includes you.

In her last exhibition at The Lane Gallery, In Loving Memory, Neal also explored cultural identity, the value of history and the complexities of human connection. That show contemplated how artefacts can be both personal adornment and remnants of material culture.  She used wood, wool, feathers and paper in a celebration of European and Maori collision.

How the two cultures are married together also shape this show and will undoubtedly be a recurring discussion in her future work. Here, the Maori story is rendered with European materials. It’s a simple, effective weave.

Alexis Neal’s extraordinary skill as a printmaker seriously enamoured with paper also carries through – obviously - to In Exchange for a Musket. Tribute is given to an element of the previous show in the form of sculptural pieces created from woven paper.  Leaf shapes, instantly recognisable as our national symbol, the silver fern, are woven into a funereal wreath, in apparent sorrow. And Remembrance features orange paper roses – buds of memory looped, together with clues and hints and echoes, into a fabulous, beautiful, emotional eulogy.

She’s making her own artefacts.

She’s honouring her own memories.

Kathryn Webster

Alexis Neal: Locating the Cultural Self

“I Remain”, announces Alexis Neal, living and breathing through the feather-sewn canvas with the pronounced capital I. This notion of the past meeting the present in the exploration of cultural identity is shared with the post-colonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha. Neal inserts her identity into her work as a means to recreating the past, as well as exploring the role that adornment plays in the construction of cultural identity, particularly in the representation of the Other.

Of Maori and European descent, Alexis Neal travelled to London to embark on a Master’s Degree at Slade School of Fine Art. Neal’s choice to explore her cultural identity from afar, focusing particularly on her Maori heritage, demonstrates the need to step outside oneself in order to examine identity. Homi Bhabha speaks of the importance of stepping outside of cultural boundaries, reflecting on differences rather then being contained by constructed definitions of culture. Bhabha’s idea that a boundary provides a link, rather then acting as a constraint, is key to his theory that culture is not fixed by place, saying a “boundary becomes the place from which something begins its precensing.”  
 
London’s museums also provided Neal with the largest collection of Maori Taonga in the world. But for Neal, the viewing of the objects in these collections produced many questions. How had these objects arrived here? By whose hand? And who was telling their story? The objects Neal viewed remained under the control of those that presented them, as colonised objects, and Bhabha proposes the creation of culture without an “assumed or imposed hierarchy.” Neal questioned the right to the ownership and display of objects belonging to the Other.

For this ‘displaced’ artist, the objects kept and displayed at the British museums could be seen as a reflection of herself, and Neal felt an overwhelming sense of loss. She harnessed this emotional response, creating a series of works such as “If you could run your finger across the surface.” Suffocated by the glass, unable to breath, the untouchable collection includes the end of a gun, Taiaha-shaped weapons, and a wooden box. These are all objects that, in this context, can perpetuate stereotypes in their depiction of the world of the Other, such as the primitive savage with their weapons. The artefacts depicted are representative, ostensibly to educate, and Neal asks in what capacity the artefact can survive and what happens to the memories, the history, the place of origin, and the culture they represent.

Not only have the objects in “If you could run your fingers…” been displaced physically, they also refuse to be placed within any fixed time. This is in line with Bhabha’s position that, the “…borderline work of culture demands an encounter with newness that is not part of the continuum of past and present…such art does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent ‘in between space’ that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present. The ‘past-present’ becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living.” Key to Neal’s work is the idea that the past is crucial in informing the present, central to whom we are and how we identify ourselves. Bhabha’s past/present appears in If you could run your fingers across the surface as Neal carves her own marks into the gun, inserting her identity and reshaping this collection from the past.

The voicing of identity through work produces ideas on narrative, and the role this plays in the creation of a national identity. Rather then being classed as narratives from the minority, or the Other, Bhabha stresses that all narratives should be seen as integral to the creation of national identity. Bhabha believes these narratives should run together, from the past and present in the creation of culture, as opposed to the creation of culture simply by class or capitalism. Key to this idea is that culture shouldn’t be defined under generic blankets, and like Neal, Bhabha sees a need for the voice of the individual, asking who the representatives of these constructed cultures actually are, and what makes up these cultural communities?

This idea of classification and the placement of identity within a categorized box that is developed in
If you could run your fingers across the surface is further explored in Neal’s self-portraits, where she challenges the generic nature of 19th century colonial portraits, and objectification of those caught within the frame. Rather than presenting herself as the passive subject, Neal challenges stereotypes in the self-portrait Wahine Toa. Neal wished to project an image of standing and status, saying, “women actually played quite an important role within the exchange of land and ownership, they were good negotiators and carried a lot of mana for those important roles.” This idea is voiced in Neal’s exhibition Exchange for a Musket, where, in an exhibition about trade and exchange, women feature more then their male counterparts.

Wahine Toa was inspired by the Goldie exhibition of 1997 after the artist witnessed members of the public laying wreaths on portraits of deceased relatives. By creating self-portraits that reference a people who were colonised both in life and through the painter’s brush, Neal’s works ask what happens to individuality in the representation of the Other, particularly when sat within the frame of the portrait? Neal’s self-portrait echoes elements of the Goldie portraits, in the way the subject is dressed and placed within the frame. There can be no way of knowing whether Goldie’s sitters chose their adornment and dress or were simply dressed to fit the stereotype, perhaps that of the noble savage, members of a dying race. Neal challenges the authority of those that capture the Other within the frame, raising questions on the willingness of the subject and the authenticity of the resulting images.

In Wahine Toa Neal inserts what has become a signature of her work; adornment and the role this plays in shaping our cultural identity. Unlike the sitters for Goldie, we know that the artist has a choice in her adornment, and in Wahine Toa the artist is adorned, or “dressed up” with the Huia. Neal’s works provoke the thought that perhaps the adornment the sitter wore carried more weight then the individual. Neal looks at the way that adornment becomes the subject over the person, demonstrating the power of the object and adornment in the representation of colonial subjects.

The choice of medium in Wahine Toa is carefully considered, the velvety mezzotint mirroring the grain of the canvas and the warm tones of the rich oils. The use of a European method such as mezzotint in the depiction of Maori subjects signifies a fusion of cultures and can be read as a representation of the artist’s identity in the work, proving that even medium can be a tool in the representation of the self. So where does Neal locate herself in terms of culture? Of Maori and Pakeha descent, Neal herself is an example of a type of “in between”, and this is explored in the work Wahine Toa. Neal has opted not to title the work as a self-portrait, but Wahine Toa does reference the artist’s tribe (Ngati Toa), so she is at once inside and outside of the image. Bhabha speaks of the possibility of the creation of identities that are not defined in binary oppositions, but of cultural difference with overlaps and splits, describing culture as both a “vision and a construction.”

Bhabha talks of “new signs of identity” which arise from cultural difference, and adornment epitomises this, as meaning that can be assigned to objects and adornment by different cultures can shift when placed within the artist’s hands. The shifting of cultural identity is illustrated in the performative piece Self Portrait. As a framed work behind glass, the viewer becomes the viewed; they are inserted into the frame and adorned with objects of the past. Neal addresses the location of the Other by freeing the “typical” subject from the frame, the two huia feathers that remain being a symbol of freedom in Maori culture. The insertion of the viewer into the frame means they are adorned, like the early colonial subjects, with the huia plume. In Maori culture, high status was depicted by the heavy adornment of Taonga, and notably, the placement of the highly prized huia feather on the head, the most tapu part of the body. This work creates what Bhabha calls the “displacement of domains of difference.” The importance of the Huia plume projects a position of status onto the viewer, whether they are worthy or not. This reinforces Neal’s question as to the authenticity of the adornment worn by Goldie’s sitters, but also creates the “newness” Bhabha spoke of, creating new identities that draw on the past. Bhabha speaks of fluidity between the past and present, and in Self-Portrait, the viewer is positioned in both. In Wahine Toa, Neal is also placed both in the past and the present, ageing her image in the portrait. In doing so she creates of layers of history and identity within the frame. The works reclaim representations of Maori women from the past, giving them a voice and bringing them into the now.

Neal’s works defy a culture determined by “pre given” ethnic traits, choosing instead to address Bhabha’s belief in the shifting, changing and overlapping idea of culture. Locating herself “in between”, Neal’s cultural space is one of choice. Her self-portraits allow her the option to disappear, to be adorned, the choice to be represented, as one culture, or an Other.