Jason Hall: Ornaments for the Pākehā
Lower Hutt: Pataka, 2004
Since 1998 Jason Hall’s jewellery has been asking questions about Pākehā identity. His work represents a consistent struggle to negotiate being Pākehā through the tradition and craft of contemporary jewellery – itself a tradition deeply embedded in discourses of Pākehā identity since the 1980s and the pioneering of a local jewellery tradition that drew on natural materials and indigenous objects (Māori and Pacific Island). Jewellery is currently one of the leading art practices in Aotearoa investigating such themes, and it offers a unique way of thinking through such debates as appropriation and identity because of its immediate relationship to the body and personal identity.
Hall’s jewellery operates around a smart discovery, which, plainly stated, is that the things which we have in common are also the things which keep us apart. This idea was first realised in The Gate Between series (2002), in which the kōwhaiwhai-like wrought iron patterns of gates throughout suburban Aotearoa became sterling silver brooches coated with house paint. That which we have in common – such as a scrolling, curvilinear design – is that which keeps us apart, because twenty years of debate has made it clear that Pākehā can’t use Māori art without controversy. This isn’t a sign of a shared visual heritage.
Asking what might be appropriate ‘ornaments for the Pākehā’, this catalogue explores the way in which Hall’s work has engaged the history of jewellery in order to think through the specifics of Pākehā identity at the turn of a new millennium.
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