The Line Is Me: Painting as a Metaphorical Unsettling of Colonial Legacy

Abstract

The Line Is Me: Painting as a Metaphorical Unsettling of Colonial Legacy seeks to engage with my colonial inheritance, and its implications for my life and art practice. In my paintings, line represents the ways of thinking and being that I have inherited as a Pākehā descendant of settlers and an artist working within Anglo-European painting traditions. Discovering my Pākehā ethnicity as an adult has motivated this journey. ‘Landscape’ as a colonial construct is the art historical context for considering my relationship to line. The Anglo-European mythology of Arcadia is examined for its contradictory framing of land as both awe-inspiring and in need of taming and cultivating, feeding into the nineteenth century Aotearoa colonial fiction of Maoriland. The research project considers my own absorption of this worldview and how it has informed my visual use of landscape, from initially representing idealised views of Aotearoa to a realisation that the literal depiction of landscape perpetuates rather than critiques colonialism. Engaging a settler responsibility methodology, and being responsive to te Tiriti and what it asks of me as tangata tiriti, informs my unmaking of line.