MonoMonday – Pure Transition.

When we had our super tour of New Zealand just over 3 years ago we visited Waitanga and saw a huge war canoe.  This photo shows a small reconstructed canoe and as the challenge for today is MonoMonday – Pure Transition. I thought this war canoe in the Royal Scottish Museum might be appropriate to illustrate the transition from a damaged canoe with many parts missing to a reconstruction of what it might have looked like using both its pure natural materials and Perspex additions.  I think it works very well.
It has been constructed from the remains of an older, larger Maori canoe that pre-dates the 1822 date of this canoe and is possibly a smaller replica of a large war canoe used by Maoris and believed to have belonged to Sir Thomas Brisbane who was Governor of New South Wales in Australia and brought back to Scotland as a souvenir.
The Maori craftsman George Nuku was assigned the task of reconstructing it and used a mixture of traditional Maori carvings and more contemporary styles. He stated that he thought that the qualities of perspex are already divine and was just making its divinity apparent.  The perspex Taurapa at its head incorporates the thistle from the banner head of The Scotsman national newspaper.
The qualities are incredible, its transparent quality, for me it encapsulates both light and water, the source of life itself, in this marvellous material and I always argue that, if my ancestors had this stuff before they would not have hesitated to realise its remarkable properties. Because of its transparency it’s almost like it’s not there but it is there.  From my experience as a Maori artist we are taught to do it this way anyway by, for example, with wood, inlaying it with shell and binding it with feathers is bringing together three forms of divinity from the land, from the forest, from the trees, from the shell of the haliotis, the abalone, the paua shell from the ocean and the feathers from the domain of the air and the plastic fits perfectly in line with this.

(The extra shows it in colour.)