Jewellery as a counter-memorial offering : mapping a creative practice : submitted in partial fulfilment of Massey University, Master of Fine Arts

Abstract

My artistic project is an investigation of how I, as a Pākehā contemporary jeweller, understand, interpret, and purpose my work in the socio-historical context of Aotearoa New Zealand. I am guided by my relationship with place, buildings, and processes of decay, and frame my view of the land here ever mindful of the impact of colonisation. In doing so, I was taken by the challenge posed by Owen Hatherley in Artificial Islands – a collection of essays about the architectural structures that have left marks of the legacy of the British Empire in Commonwealth countries: could the colonial landscape be subjected to a process of unmaking? I therefore set out to explore how jewellery could become a tool for this unmaking, and to symbolically counter structures rooted in empire-building. I use the prefix counter, from the Latin root contra, “opposite, contrary to, against, in return” (“Etymonline” 2025), as a critical tool throughout the project. From the discovery of the term ‘counter-memorial’ midway through the first year, I have applied it as a way of imagining change in the face of the everyday reality of the impact of British colonisation in Aotearoa New Zealand. It is a responsive, facilitating term in the context of the work I make, as I contemplate the role of Pākehā in our society and the myriad decisions and actions that have manifested this identity. This approach anchors me to the rerekē strangeness of my ethnicity as I explore the implications of my belonging here in Aotearoa. The processes and techniques I employ are my method of enquiry. My artefact/objects, which I term ‘tool-ornaments’, acknowledge the histories of my ancestors and serve as counter-memorials to events that are part of my colonial heritage. The materials I am drawn to are associated with the craft practices of Anglo-Saxon culture and include farming implements and tools, kitchen ingredients and introduced plants, in order to both explore and defamiliarise their effects on the natural and built environments of Aotearoa. In crafting them I consider the ongoing impact of the materials I am drawn to. I frequently employ repetitive, cumulative processes associated with craft practices rooted in Anglo-Saxon culture that serve to reveal the subject matter by transforming familiar objects in unfamiliar ways. My work emerges from attempts to view this place through a problematising lens, speaking to my rerekē identity. Underpinning this Master of Fine Arts thesis is an interrogation of the term “decolonisation”. Naturally, this is not a subject I approach lightly: I have looked, in particular, to prominent academic Moana Jackson to provide the parameters around which I might base my work in this appropriately thorny context. This exegesis is a critical reflection of the two-and-a-half-year process of attempting to grasp slippery ideas: these six individual projects were made in parallel while contending with both my parents’ end of-life illnesses. The circumstances leading up to their passing, and the accompanying exhausting practicalities became implicated in the work. The research traverses three main themes: offering and events, memorials and ruins, and maps and territory, through a process of finding meaning in the deconstruction of materials of my culture. These are an attempt to make a new, different whole, to better understand my place here as tangata Tiriti. In turn, I offer this work to a Pākehā audience in particular: to take up the challenge of being actively engaged in the process of acknowledging the truths of our individual and collective pasts, and being sincerely occupied in restoring processes that champion the support of tino rangatiratanga in our individual and collective futures.