Doctrines is an enlarged version of a sculptural work that artist George Watson made with a blacksmith. It was exhibited at Coastal Signs 2023, as part of Watson and Peter Simpson’s joint exhibition He Rāwaho.
The work draws on traditional forging techniques used to make decorative wrought iron gates as well as branding irons that were used in early agriculture to mark sheep, cattle and wool bales. Here the artist has taken elements from the cross, branding irons, and wrought iron gates and merged them to speak to the intertwined legacies of religious assimilation, colonial agricultural practices, and the dispossession and privatisation of Māori land.
Watson is also interested in Victorian ornamentation and the ‘proprietary impulse’ of early settler society which prompted them to import ornamental conventions to fabricate a ‘Britain of the South’. In the Arts and Crafts tradition, stylised botanical motifs were carved into villa fretwork, often made from native timber, and hammered into wrought iron gates. These motifs reference plants from the British Empire, incongruous amongst Aotearoa’s landscapes and histories. Watson highlights the strangeness of the gated villa’s white and fanciful apparition.
In Doctrines, the Victorian scrolls, flourishes, spirals, fretworks and vines are underwritten – even haunted by – kōwhaiwhai; by koru, mangōpare, puhoro, and manawa lines. Kōwhaiwhai tells stories of Te Aho; of connection. Running across the tāhuhu (ridge pole) of meeting houses, kōwhaiwhai functions to encode whakapapa, binding generations to their whenua. In her novel Whaea Blue (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024), writer Talia Marshall notes, while walking the streets of Gisborne, “The ornate wood carvings on some of the Victorian villas feel like kōwhaiwhai. They feel Māori.”