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Reuben Paterson is a New Zealand artist of Maori descent. A recent studio resident at the International Curatorial Studio in New York, Paterson has spent the past years working in America and the European cities of Athens, Pescara and London. Primarily a painter, Paterson has become widely known for his re-interpretations of Maori iconography, which are often celebrated in glitter. I met with Reuben Paterson as I was particularly curious to learn how his recent internationalism has affected his practice and its cultural interpretation. |
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Kotahitanga – Anna Jackson
Reuben Paterson is a New Zealand artist of Maori descent. A recent studio resident at the International Curatorial Studio in New York, Paterson has spent the past years working in America and the European cities of Athens, Pescara and London. Primarily a painter, Paterson has become widely known for his re-interpretations of Maori iconography, which are often celebrated in glitter. I met with Reuben Paterson as I was particularly curious to learn how his recent internationalism has affected his practice and its cultural interpretation.
Anna Jackson: Back at home (New Zealand), your earlier work was recognized as being distinctly Maori. Can you speak, firstly, about those aspects of your cultural heritage with which you most strongly identify?
Reuben Paterson: It is purely about identity. Identity, for me, has been about the knowing and the being known; the ease of familiarity, and of language. The Maori word to describe this is turangawaewae, or, the sense of place and the identity that locality gives you when you belong to it. The visual identity of Maori, through both contemporary and traditional pattern and decoration, excerpts a Gothic depth through tone and color; this depth is, of course, sourced from nature and our very weathered southern outpost. These markers are what I am strongly identifying with on my return home.
A.J.: How integral to the reading of your work, do you think, is an intimate knowledge of Maori-dom?
RP: There has been a true lack of courtesy when it comes to the appropriation and understanding of Maori imagery past the Pacific Rim. Our true voice, the “us,” as the speakers, justifies its true meaning. Rather than being educational, interesting or just a cultural novelty, the work I produce is just a base for the experience—for how I see the world. This empiricist world comes from my Maori, Scottish and New Zealand descent. Returning to New Zealand, I acknowledge that globalization may have added cultural confusion within gallery spaces, but art that is free from specificities—free to speak in its own language—is the work that most interests me. This sense of an open, communicative space has been described by Lucy Lippard, when she wrote of the vestiges in every place that is not altogether culturally determined—or that interacts with cultural assumptions to form a kind of hybrid location.
A.J.: You are often included in shows that explore cultural identity. Do you feel that your work has been over-contextualized as "Maori?”
RP: I describe myself as Maori, and feel that my experiences are invested in being Maori. So, naturally, the work will be Maori.
AJ: Do you think your work experiences some kind of cultural assimilation as it is seen abroad, or can it maintain a purely Kiwi aesthetic?
RP: The medium of glitter is global enough to be the source of an experience encountered by everyone, and my interest in iconic cultural decoration enhances those disputes over definitions and territories as it exists in gaps between things: at the contested borderlines of material assemblies as well as disciplines, classes and genders. I often think of the challenges that decoration encounters, through its own enduring art history, and see it as a mirror of my attempt to assimilate into the culture of Greece, when I was living between Athens and the Island of Ikaria in 2005 and 2006.
By espousing visual icons—like objects and patterns that can connect cultures—and relating them back to the world of Maori, I see the locality create its own language. This romantic interpretation generates a kotahitanga, or, one people utopia.
AJ: Some say that art, like fruit, tends to lose some of its punch when exported? Do you think, having spent so much time abroad recently, that when your work is seen outside of New Zealand, it loses some of its flavor?
RP: Relating to my personal ownership of culture and my understanding of what being Maori is becomes more freely accessible to a truly confused majority, but it also enhances my other descent lines.
AJ: So a work like Greek Gourds—in which you used the gourd as an icon of both Maori and Greek tradition and decorated it in the tradition of Maori—becomes a measure of how objects/icons can be released from a kind of cultural burdening that they might experience closer to a source of cultural knowledge and understanding?
RP: Yes. It was while reading “Time and Place” by Peter Eleey in Frieze that I felt eager to refute his notion that art is somehow disempowered as it moves from its local source of cultural identity. Rather than losing any flavor, how will the gourds’ flavor be enhanced by the similarities of our cultures? The use of traditional pattern and utilizing objects like the gourd, and its traditions which have been replaced, is like reliving that burning sense of discovery and wonder, a sense of doing things for the first time as our ancestors did.
AJ: Your practice seems to have taken a new turn since returning to New Zealand—where is all the glitter?
RP: I’m using completely different materials now, I have found no need to use glitter. Some material elements re-emerge through from my old work, like the use of shoes, but each material becomes a testing ground for transforming the perception of ordinary materials through repetition and change—so as to exceed the previous understanding of that object or material.
AJ: Can this been interpreted as a reaction to how your work has been interpreted in more international contexts?
RP: There have been many differing perspectives in relation to the reading of my work in an international context. In creating optical installations, I began noticing more and more interpretations from viewers based on Gestalt’s principles. It’s like we all have an innate tendency to perceive multiple objects as a group, or in totality, and we base this interpretation on certain perceptual clues.
