Māori works of art are not only beautiful to look at, but also reveal a great deal about their society’s beliefs, history and social structure.
The classic art of New Zealand Māori is an unsurpassed Pacific tribal art. Many creative styles and much skilled craftsmanship yielded, and continue to yield, objects of great beauty. To appreciate the achievements of Māori arts and crafts, it is invaluable to have an understanding of the materials used, the techniques of crafts, design and symbolism, and the economic, social and religious requirements that inspired the making of artefacts.
An 18th-century engraving of a Māori man.
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CULTURAL CONNECTIONS
Traditional Māori artefacts fell into three distinctive categories. The first was communally owned objects, such as waka (war canoes). The second category consisted of personal items (for more information, click here), such as garments, pounamu (greenstone) ornaments, combs, musical instruments and indelible skin tattoos, while the last category encompassed artefacts of ritual magic kept under the guardianship of tohunga (priests) – godsticks, crop gods and anything else used in ceremonial communication with gods and ancestral spirits.
Periods of Māori art merge, yet there are four distinctive eras: Archaic, Classic, Historic and Modern. The Archaic Māori, immediate descendants of the Polynesians who first settled the land, survived by hunting, fishing and foraging. Their art, including carvings and bone and stonework, is characterised by austere forms that, as pure sculpture, can surpass much of the later work.
In time, the cultivation of the sweet potato (kumara) and other crops, along with an advanced ability to exploit all natural resources of forest and ocean, allowed a settled way of village life. With this came food surpluses, a tightly organised tribal system and territorial boundaries. These were the Classic Māori, and their altered society supported dedicated crafts-people within each community.
Carving on a Māori meeting house.
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The third period of Māori art, the Historic, underwent rapid changes due to the adoption of metal tools, Christianity, Western fabrics, newly introduced crops, muskets and cannon. The fourth phase, the Modern, was under way before 1900, and remains with us. The great rise in interest in Māori culture (Māoritanga) in recent decades is in step with a renaissance of Māori culture.
DISPLAYING HIERARCHY
Society and the arts have always been associated with fighting chiefs who had a hereditary right to control tribal affairs. They were the best dressed, ornamented and accoutred: tribal prestige (mana) depended on these leaders.
People dressed according to rank – chiefs (rangatira), nobles (ariki), commoners (tutua) and slaves (taurekareka) – yet when engaged in daily routine work both high and low classes used any old garments. Men and women wore a waist wrap, plus a shoulder cloak when weather or ceremony required. Pre-pubescent children usually went about naked.
The special indication of rank was the facial tattoo. Men’s faces were marked in painful, deep-grooved cuts made by bird-bone chisels dipped in a sooty pigment, which looked blue under the skin. Northern warriors often had additional tattoos over buttocks and thighs. Women were deeply tattooed on their lips and chin, made blue by the use of comb-type ‘needles’.
Elaborate moko tattoo.
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PRECIOUS POSSESSIONS
The personal possessions of the Māori demonstrate their most exquisite artwork. Combs, feathered garments, treasure boxes, cloak pins, greenstone ornaments (including hei-tiki ancestral pendants) and weapons were often given a ‘personal touch’ to reflect the mana (spiritual authority) of their owner. Wooden treasure boxes (wakahuia) were made to contain some of the more precious items, such as greenstone ornaments or feathers. These lidded boxes, designed to be hung from house rafters, were ornately carved on all sides, but especially on the underside since they were so frequently looked at from below.
This remarkable artwork can still be seen on Māori mummified heads, a process involving steaming, smoking and oiling: heads so treated remained intact and retained hair, skin and teeth. Out of respect for Māori beliefs, such heads are rarely exhibited in New Zealand’s museums.
ART FOR THE GODS
Religious inspiration in Māori art was based on the prevailing beliefs about gods and ancestral spirits. In pre-Christian times supernatural beings were believed to inhabit natural objects. Rituals and chants were thus necessary to ensure the successful pursuit of any task.
In traditional Māori society the sexes were kept apart in all their craft activities. While men worked the hard materials of wood, bone and stone, women used soft materials (for more information, click here) or prepared flax fibres used in making garments and decorative taniko borders. It was believed women were noa – non-sacred – and the male, conversely, a tapu (sacred or holy) being. This put females in a subservient position which precluded them from high religious practices and from crafts and activities in which high gods and ancestral spirits were directly involved.
Priests used wooden godsticks (tiki wananga), bound with sacred cords and dressed in red feathers to communicate with gods and ancestral spirits to protect the welfare of the tribe. Stone crop gods (taumata atua) were placed in or near gardens to promote fertility in growing crops.
Wooden burial chests were used to contain the bones of the deceased. Māori burial practice, at least for persons of rank, required an initial burial, then a recovery of the bones a year or two later when a final, ceremonial burial would take place. Monuments and cenotaphs of various forms were erected in memory of the dead. Some were posts with carvings of stylised humans called tiki (see below), while others took the form of canoes buried in the earth deeply enough to stand vertically.
SYMBOLS AND MOTIFS IN MĀORI ART
In Māori art, the human form, dominant in most compositions, is generally referred to as a tiki and represents the first created man of Māori mythology. The pounamu (greenstone) hei-tiki pendant is the best known of ornaments. Tiki represent ancestors and gods in the sculptural arts, and may be carved in wood, bone or stone. In ceremonial meeting-house architecture, ancestral tiki were carved on panels supporting the rafters or on other parts of the structure. They were highly stylised with large heads to fill in areas of posts or panels. This design also stressed the importance of the head in Māori belief – along with the sexual organs, it was the most sacred part of the body.
Māori warrior carving.
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Sexual organs were often exaggerated in both male and female carved figures; both penis and vulva were regarded as centres of potent magic in promoting fertility and protection. Small birth figures were often placed between the legs or on the bodies of tiki representing descending generations. The out-thrust tongue was an expression of defiance and of protective magic.
Often tiki figures have slanted, staring eyes, clawed hands with a spur thumb, a beaked mouth and other bird-like features. These motifs probably stemmed from the belief that the souls of the dead and the gods used birds as spirit vehicles.
The manaia, another major symbol, is a beaked figure rendered in profile with a body that has arms and legs.
Whales (pakake) and whale-like creatures appeared on the slanting facades of storehouses. Some fish, dogs and other creatures occurred in carvings, but on the whole they are rare; there was no attempt to depict nature in a naturalistic way. Marakihau, fascinating mermen monsters of the taniwha class (mythical monsters), appeared on panels and as greenstone ornaments. Marakihau were probably ancestral spirits that took to the sea and are depicted on 19th-century house panels with sinuous bodies terminating in curled tails. Their heads have horns, large round eyes and tube tongues, and were occasionally depicted sucking in a fish.
Carved pounamu (greenstone) pendant.
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With no written language, the Indigenous Māori relied on sophisticated oral traditions. Considerable mana (prestige) was bestowed on the best orators.
The koru, a well-known symbol based on an emerging fern frond, is today often used as a symbol of New Zealand, including Air New Zealand’s company logo; the symbol signifies new life, adventure, an awakening.
CRAFT TOOLS AND MATERIALS
The tools and materials of the Māori craftwork were limited to woods, stone, fibres and shells; metal tools did not exist until after the arrival of the Europeans. Adzes, the principal equipment for woodcarvers, were made of stone blades lashed to wooden helves. Pounamu, the nephritic jade also known as greenstone, was the most valued blade material and was sacred. Found only on the western coast of the South Island, this rare commodity was widely traded. Chisels, stone-pointed rotary drills and various wooden wedges and mallets completed the Māori tool kit.
Carving a Māori mask.
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The introduction of oil-based paints ousted the old red ochre pigment (kokowai), which can be seen today only in traces on older carvings. The later practice of overpainting old carvings with European red paint was unfortunate as it obliterated much patination and often the older ochres, resulting in the loss of the polychrome-painted work of the Historic period.
The iridescent paua (abalone) shell was used as inlay in woodcarving, and textile dyes were made from barks. A deep-black dye was obtained by soaking fibres in swamp mud.
Flax plaited into cords provided fine fibre for garments and baskets. As there were no metal nails and the Māori did not use wooden pegs as an alternative, war canoes, houses and food stores were assembled using flax cord. Weavers fashioned intricate ceremonial clothing from feathers, flax and other materials.
The New Zealand forests contained larger trees than Polynesians would previously have seen. This enabled them to build bigger dugout canoes, and also contributed to the woodcarving tradition. Durable totara and kauri trees, the latter found only in the warm, northern parts of the North Island, were favoured by carvers, and bone was used in many ways. Whalebone was especially favoured for weapons, while sperm whale teeth made fine ornaments, and feathers decorated weapons and cloaks.