Ambiguous adornment

Jason Hall draws inspiration from his West Auckland suburban environs. Pictures / Carolyn Robertson

Jason Hall's jewellery may appear to follow the example of artists such as Gordon Walters and Dick Frizzell by appropriating Maori iconography, but these symbols are rooted in the traditions of Hall's own Pakeha heritage.

He proudly draws inspiration from his West Auckland suburban environs, replicating the carved forms of picket fencing and the kowhaiwhai-like curves of wrought iron gates.

He may seem to be sidestepping the appropriation debate by sourcing his shapes directly from European objects but he wilfully presents them in an ambiguous fashion.

"People would look at them and say, 'Oh, Maori kowhaiwhai', and, indeed, that's exactly the game I'm playing," he says. "I am just pointing out that we [Pakeha] have traditions of our own; there is no need to appropriate.

"I'm not completely against appropriation either. In its more benign forms, or when it's more negotiated, there might be ways around it. I'm not saying it's always bad.

"The reason it's interesting is because of that debate - it doesn't exist without it. I'm not trying to sidle past it with my head down. It is like trying to engage it in a new way.

"I don't like to give answers because there aren't any. The interesting thing about who we are and where we live is that we are constantly questioning ourselves."

Completing a degree at Manukau Institute of Technology's School of Fine Arts in the late 90s puts Hall among the first generation of New Zealand jewellers to receive a more academic training, with concepts becoming just as important as the technical expertise of the craft.

Although this means he can look to artists such as Peter Robinson, Shane Cotton and Michael Parekowhai for existing discussion on the grey areas of cultural identity and iconography, he is still hugely influenced by the traditions of New Zealand contemporary jewellery.

"The Fingers group - for want of a better term, the stone-bone-shell makers - really captured something in the 80s and 90s that New Zealand was hungry for. I think we were experiencing a growing awareness of our role in the Pacific and that had some value, compared with pining for England.

"Using shell and assemblage techniques that are common to the Pacific, rather than Europe, really captured people's imagination and they wore it quite proudly.

"They were looking back to a pre-European stone culture so the methodologies were quite intuitive, quite material-based. They looked to express something, as the hippies did, that was pre-industrial revolution.

"I didn't grow up looking to that, I grew up in a fairly urban environment and one way of differentiating myself and trying to capture my moment was to look directly to where I live - 1950s West Auckland housing and those sorts of things.

"I am looking for the machine-made, I am using things like galvanising and powder-coating and I've tried to get my materials to reflect those things as well."

Hall's picket fences may invoke debates of colonialism and land ownership but their origins are less political. Cycling to work one day, a not-so-fit and possibly dehydrated and delirious Hall imagined the pairs of nail holes in the fences he was passing as being like eyes.

By crafting smaller versions into brooches made from bone, he has cunningly replicated the worn textures of weathered wooden posts and referenced the fences that protect graveyards.

"As soon as you put aside the meta-narrative of why people go to war, what men go and die for is their little quarter acre. In a way, we've all sharpened sticks, like Maori pa, and put them outside our precious places to keep them safe.

"At the time the debate had died down a little bit - it was pre-Brash when I made these. But I felt it was still a live issue how we defined where we lived and all those sorts of things. So, putting the eyes in them, it made these things alive.

"That line about who owns what and how we come to terms with it, it was still really a live issue for me. And then of course Brash and the Orewa speech gave it a whole new significance, which was interesting. It hadn't gone away."

As a piece of jewellery, Hall's posts can be worn, acting as a defence of the wearer's personal space and making it clear the viewer is on the other side; a defiant stance he says is important for bicultural dialogue.

* Ornaments for the Pakeha by Jason Hall is at Objectspace, to July 16