FRED GRAHAM, Whiti Te Ra, The Sun Shines, 1966 Venice Biennale 2024

Fred & Brett Graham, father and son, about 1974

carving memories on the surface of time by Rosanna Albertini

History vanishes if no one writes stories, but even written deteriorates as much as the paper, never absorbed. The writer is not able to open history’s mouth like a midwife, and collect the whole body of dragons and ladders disguised under a double name: matters of fact. After decades spent writing, my illusionary attachment to the past disappeared: we accumulate stories in books not to preserve their truth, whose truth? Thucydides’? Mark Twain’s? Primo Levi’s?  Shklovskij’s? All the Historians’? We mainly pack them in the closet and forget them. We like to be new, to look foreword. Only when the end of life approaches, we perceive what we don’t see.

“I was made of a changing substance, of mysterious time. 

Maybe the source is in me.

Maybe be out of my shadow

the day arise, relentless and unreal.”

“We are our memory,

we are this chimerical museum of shifting forms,

this hip of broken mirrors.”  Jorge Luis Borges

The printed age and the age of colonization cover the same volume of time. Fred Graham and his son Brett Graham are both Maori sculptors. Carvers of monuments in which Maori history resurrects from colonialist denial. Their art includes the inevitable integration – Brett’s mother is not a Maori – and yet their works, silent and powerful, let us face the indomitable energy of a living civilization. No isolationism, in either of them. 

After the war, Fred Graham found himself in between traditional Maori art and what he calls “the modern movement of forms toward a new order reshaped by human mind.” Leaning towards the echoes of Modernism — the chaotic, idealistic response to the worst face humans showed to each other in a half century of wars — Maori artists tried to hold together personal vision ( implying freedom about tools, language and materials) and attachment to the spirit of the old, without which they would have lost the unique character of their culture: a chain of love, fight, and trust. 

FRED GRAHAM, Tinirau and the Whale, 1971 Venice Biennale 2024

FRED GRAHAM, Maui Steals the Sun, 1971 Venice Biennale 2024

FRED GRAHAM, Tamariki a Tangaroa, 1970 Venice Biennale 2024

Grace, Hetet, To Kanawa, Rare, Harrison, Tukaokao, Matchitt, Nin, Graham, Wilson, Muru,  Hotere, Tuwhare were pioneer artists seeking more than survival or local recognition. For a short while, they shared the New Zealand Maori Artists and Writers Society, founded in 1973. They were river, and island, as in a poem by Hone Tuwhare: The River Is an Island.

FRED GRAHAM, Kaitiaki, 2004, in the Auckland Domain in Auckland, The 11.8-metre-tall (39 ft) piece depicts a kāhu pōkere (harrier hawk), a bird that features as a guardian in Ngāti Whātua and Tainui oral histories. (Wikipedia)

FRED GRAHAM, Washbowl of Sorrow, 2004 stainless steel, kauri, totara, and customwood 734 x 55 x 82mm Waikato Raupatu Lands Trust Visual Arts Waikato museum.

FRED GRAHAM, Waka Maumahare, 2022, stainless steel, 16 m. high, it weighs 5 tons. Photo Waka Kotahi (Inspired by the story of the Tainui waka – a canoe carved from a tree that was planted on the grave of Tainui, the son of a chief Tinirau and his wife Hinerau in Hawaiki. One of the first canoes to reach the New Zealand shore, according to the legend.)

The artist on his way to bless the art piece Photo: Waka Kotahi

Birds are a constant presence in Fred Graham’s vertical, tall and elegant monuments for more than half century. They stand on the land, and look as if wanting to fly toward the sky. Birds were the only animals in New Zealand in a pre-historic time, before Maoris arrived; how closer to creation not even the myth can say.  Fred never broke the chain, he is the prince of Aotearoa’s Maori artists. A living ancestor whose moral authority will never disappear. Brett says that his own closeness to his father’s art was not transferred by words. He calls it sort of ‘osmosis.’ How lucky Fred is as a father! Not only Brett did not break the chain, he added his own vision. He carves the Maori stories in wood. Mallet and chisel are his pen. His pieces often cross the ocean. They are astonishing.                  

In 2024, Fred and Brett’s artworks were together in the same space of the Corderie dell’Arsenale, at the Venice Biennale. The first time for Fred, not for Brett, whose Aniwaniwa  had been installed in Venice in 2007. 

Maoris don’t have books. Past and present, since the first canoe from Polynesia reached the shore of New Zealand —it was about the thirteen century— are only one thing: generations passing on memories from mouth to mouth. Easy to say… Let’s change mode, from history to personal stories. I have been in Aotearoa. Brett Graham was my guide in his Maori tribe. Journalist, I was trying to learn as much as possible about contemporary art of every kind and origin in New Zealand, to convince Flash Art it was worth writing about it.  My intellectual baggage? “That’s not reality, not for us,” Brett told me. After my pitch, Flash Art told me: too far away, why bother? Not their reality, neither. I  worked for myself and wrote a book. 

Facts are like boxes in which reality dries up, and dies of artificial stillness. But beforehand, there are coincidences, chances, wishes, delusions along with rare, unexpected moments in which you are certain  that your inner freedom has found where to be, in a tangible form. Life in the marae, the Maori communal house, pulled me out of many boxes.

2008   Pohara. Church starts before sunrise. At 7 a.m. the whole tribe stands outdoors under a spotless sky.  A flag is the only religious symbol, lifted on the top of a pole: a flying field of images assembled by an artist for people who still read the face of the day. Frosted vapor has made the grass a carpet of needles. In spite of the low temperature — and a strange sensation of endurance and sublime self-effacement —  everyone stands still until the singing starts, and hands and arms sway like waves through the fullness of feelings, and vapor spreads from the flock of humans.  Buon giorno, Good morning, Kia Ora, Bonjour. While the sun rises in front of us, overcoming a curtain of trees, singing birds join the humans for the most vibrant orchestra, as crispy as the air.  Who am I? For an instant, it doesn’t matter.

Such illusion is only mine; mythology and history for a Maori person melt into a collective preservation of memory. Roots and rituals climb like vines around care for family, friends, animals and the land. A single identity doesn’t have contour without fathers, mothers, queens and kings, ancestors. For an Italian woman like me, born to a Southern mother, mythology is no more than a fantasy unless my eyes touch it, on the curves of my mother’s shoulders just the same as the sculpted forms in the Greek statues. Personal genealogy is lost, becomes archeology. 

Dinner at Fred and Norma Graham house.  I couldn’t take my eyes off his hands. They seemed to me bigger than they should be, strong hands softened by work, hands finding a visual language for Maori stories since the very first: Rangi and Papa separated by their seven offsprings. “In the beginning Ranginui (the sky father) and Papatūānuku (the mother earth) were joined together in an eternal hug, and their children were born between them in darkness. The children decided to separate their parents, to allow light to come into the world as we see it now.”  (Wikipedia)

After dinner, I couldn’t wait to ask him, “Is the myth of creation to you something more than a vague fantasy lost in time?” “It’s a beginning carved in each contemporary story,” he answers, “a beginning oddly reminding the sons and daughters of time that their life, their stories, are inscribed into a natural universe. The carver brings them out, as if they were already existing inside the wood, only needing to be revealed, and be born.” The dog snores in the corner of a quiet studio by the dining room. Fred Graham and I enjoy the warm solitude one feels when the house has family in the next room resting, talking, cleaning the table. His fingers leafing through images of his early sculptures, those recently migrated to Venice, the same his son Brett remembers as sounds in the evening, when his father was sculpting in his studio after a day spent teaching. Brett remembers them big, he was seven at the time. I found online a recent speech of Fred’s, telling that Brett’s recent sculptures seem to him so big!  “Flesh and wood – Fred told me that evening – they are both bodies of the living. Death is only displacement. We Maori believe that when we die we become stars. I often looked at them as a child, wondering which one was grandfather.”

Brett Graham

Brett drives back to Auckland along the Waikato River’s curves. He resists my wish to talk about his artworks. See, he says, this is the way the land is forced to accept corrections. The Maori cemetery, steep on the hillside, was separated from the riverbed by the flux of cars. His grandparents, three Maori kings and their people rest there. This time too, as in many other trips, his car stops on the road when the cemetery appears. For a while, a magic silence. It’s church, inner quiet amid an outbreak of noise and billboards. 

Brett was angry at colonialism, young, and anxious to introduce the foreign person I was to the Maori’s real life and culture. We became friends. Although he still doesn’t know, I suspect, how deeply was I changed by meeting his people. Talk about art, analyze and dissect? He gave me much more. 

His recent pieces create symbolic places where fragments of Maori life —stigmatized as historical —  cannot be corrected, appropriated, in the end destroyed. Celebratory monuments that give a magnificent body to past feelings forced to withdraw under the pressure of wars in name of civilization. 

GRETT GRAHAM, Wasteland, 2024 wood, synthetic polymer paint Venice Biennale 2024

A different angle

Detail

Wetlands dried up by the British conquerors to improve agriculture, had been a mine of gold for Maoris, full of eels. Wet and eels disappeared.  Brett overloads with sculpted eels the room in which precious things were stored, put it on wheels and adds two long arms to the treasure trove. Nine months of work. Wetland. The two arms are a desperate prayer merging past and future, asking for simple understanding and respect, offering the strength of real stories. When I grew up, they told me words are stones, as if meanings could be separated by people who care about them. I am now the opposite: afraid to force real lives into the page and crush them like dry leaves. Maybe, can you tell?  Maybe words forgetting self-realization, ignoring the judgment to come, maybe they can be written and fly, happy to forget universal truths or solipsistic illusions. Brett’s artworks, at my eyes, fly in the same way. Caring is their secret core.   

BRETT GRAHAM, O’ Pioneer, 2020 Wood and plaster, 3 x 4m Photo: Mark Tantrum (Modeled on the gun turrets of ship Pioneer, an armed steam-drip built by the British New Zealand government, that invaded Waikato in 1863)

BRETT GRAHAM, The Great Replacement, 2022 12m wide. Yellow cedar 12 x 5.3 x 2.7m. Photo: John Collie. (It is an inverted ship’s hull. The materials recall Christchurch’s colonial architecture. The title connects to the white-suprematist manifesto of the terrorist who attacked Christchurch’s mosque in 2019.)

 Kia ora Fred and Brett,

back to Los Angeles after the third trip to Aotearoa, on October 15, 2009,  I tried to make the point with myself, who was I after my journey through the Maori land, and I ended up bickering with my new self. I send the botta e risposta now, in 2025, as it was the beginning of a new direction in my work that is still moving on with the same spirit. Rewriting, I made it new.                      

“I can hardly believe you went to the end of the world to the Southern hemisphere, to feel again in your bones the same chilly sensation you had in your childhood, in houses with no heating.”

Please, let me stop you. We can play with doubts and uncertainties. I knew for sure I could not plan my movements. At the same time, I did not feel deceived. 

“What a sentimentalist.”

Not at all. Reality can reveal itself.

“That’s why shivering and smelling mold was important?”

Perhaps a Demon made me dull. The main intention was not to repeat colonialist mistakes, with candies of truth in my pockets. Questioning my story, my own perception, was inevitable. Words can approach a feeling of absurd freedom. Remember W. B. Yeats? The poet who listened to the friendly silences of the moon? “It is not permitted to a woman who takes up pen and chisel, to seek originality, for passion is her only business.” I turned his words into a feminine mode. 

“You want to write about nothing, just the clouds of your own soul.”’

Exactly. Would you prefer a detailed description of the Auckland Museum? 

“You don’t care about facts.”

Precisely. Press, Internet, radio, TV, track them down. It’s more than enough.

“You are so old-fashioned!”

Even romantic. I like graveyards. Besides, if you take fashion away, you will have a fact.

“How does art fit into the picture?”

Art is a short term, personal deviation, commitment, investment, you decide.

“So you were short-sighted in Aotearoa?”

Undeniably.

“Why such an absurd report?”

If I don’t, who would? — Not worth a damn, André Gide already wrote it. We believe our ideas are smart, and belong to us, because we have not read enough. The best thoughts have already been written.

“So, why do you persist?”

My feelings are truly mine; thoughts are common domain.

“What counts then?”

Relations: with any thing or any person. Not what you think about them, what they really are. History is a spiderweb lacerated by fingers to make holes for the present.

“Great. And by doing that you are not yourself?”

If identity is the point, I would put chains around myself. Where does freedom go if physicality becomes a burden, so much so that my mind burns out the heaviness, and I must vanish in the air like the spirit from Aladdin’s lamp? But if my muscles instead, calves and heart, along with arteries, skin, bones and hair, give me my sense of myself at every second  — a human clock sculpted by time  — I feel as a tree, filling a living time that changes and expands with the body, fed by sparkles of chemistry the same as rocks, sticks, fish, leaves and grasshoppers. Solitude goes away, time fondles me. 

“Consciousness?”

Do you mean the sense of guilt, endlessly pricking the liver like Prometeus’ eagle? I can roast it and eat it.

“Do you give up with intelligence?”

No, I use it. It is a tool, not a goal.

Fred Graham

Thinking of you both Fred and Brett, from the distance of space as well of time, I see the Maori myth of creation once more releasing it’s meaning in your family story: Rangi and Papa giving birth to Brett but, this time, his life is instantly in the light as soon as he takes the first breath. Kia ora, Rosanna

BRETT GRAHAM, Cease Tide of the Wrong-Doing, 2020. 9.6m tall 3m wide, kauri and metal Photo: Vanessa Laurie/Stuff Permanently at the Govett-Brewster collection. (Ka pari te Tai Moana Ka timu te Tai Tangata –
When the Ocean tide rises, the Human tide recedes. Memorial in the form of a niu, a Pai Mārire ritual practice. In memory of the Maori resources expropriated by the British settlers.)