Artist's sudden fall from grace

By GILBERT WONG

Author Alan Duff called him a Maori hero, but today marks the end of artist Para Matchitt's first week in a jail cell at Hawkes Bay Regional Prison.

The prominent Maori artist was sentenced in the Napier District Court by Judge Neville Jaine last Monday to 2 1/2 years in prison on a charge of sexual violation of a girl who at the time was 16.

Matchitt pleaded not guilty but a jury found against him after a three-day trial.

In sentencing, Judge Jaine said 67-year-old Matchitt had breached a special relationship between two people with a 50-year age gap between them.

Matchitt had sponsored the girl's sporting career before the incident, which took place on October 5 last year.

The girl's parents claimed Matchitt's actions shattered their daughter's life. The court was told that she failed School Certificate exams, gave up her sport, took drugs, left home and went to work in a strip bar.

Before the case was heard, Matchitt, who featured in Duff's book Maori Heroes, spent time with Auckland artist Selwyn Muru.

The pair talked into the evenings as the case loomed. "I have a feeling of such pain for him. We've been mates for close to 50 years now," Muru says.

The Corrections Department has allowed Matchitt's cell to be set up as a studio, and it is likely he will carry on with his art.

Muru even predicts his "best work will come out of this. You need bloody tensions for anything to come out.

"He's done hundreds of sketches already."

But the arts community received the news of the sentence with muted shock.

Herald art critic T.J. McNamara said he had admired Matchitt's work. "But that's a terrible thing to hear."

Other artists preferred not to comment on the case, but the prevailing sentiment was that Matchitt, while he should pay for his crime, had suffered a mortal blow to his mana. One said, "His spirit will wither. There's going to be a burden of shame."

Along with Witi Ihimaera, Ralph Hotere and Don Selwyn, he was part of a group of Maori artists and writers who set a contemporary cultural agenda.

It is a sudden downfall for Matchitt, whose work has come to be part of the public landscape.

His first major work, an early highlight in his career, was the creation of a 25m by 3m-high mural Te Whanaketanga o Tainui for Turangawaewae marae, Ngaruawahia in 1975. At Taharoa, a stylised canoe prow points to the horizon. His work graces the Hamilton and Manukau district courts and he was responsible for the City to Sea bridge on the Wellington waterfront.

In his home of Napier, where he worked at the local community college until 1986, he created the metal water feature outside the Napier Visitor Information Centre. He also has a wooden sculpture in the foyer of Hawkes Bay Museum.

The Auckland Art Gallery has a major piece called Papakainga, a large wooden sculpture that draws on traditional Maori building design to produce a metaphor of universal shelter for the community. The Aotea Centre also houses one of his works.

Those who know him say he shunned the limelight and, at times, was not even comfortable that he was called an artist. He trained as a carver under Pine Taiapa but was largely self-taught and did not have a formal arts education. As an artist he has said that he was strongly influenced by the leader Te Kooti.

With other prominent Maori in the arts - Hone Tuwhare, Ralph Hotere and Muru - he founded the Maori artists organisation Nga Puna Waihanga in 1973. The organisation's signature event was a hui held on a marae each year.

Muru says the organisation and its regular hui endured for more than 20 years, but has gone into abeyance. "It was set up to make ourselves, the artists, available on a different marae each year so our own people could meet us. Even if what they had to say was not complimentary that was their right."

Despite the name, the organisation and the hui were not restricted to those of Maori descent. They were open to anyone who had an interest in contemporary Maori arts or Maori philosophy. Any and all disciplines were welcome. Pakeha writers like Maurice Shadbolt and artists like Don Binney were members.

"We had the freedom to belong to Pakeha organisations ... and it was not necessarily focused on traditional Maori crafts," Muru says. "Para, Ralph and I considered ourselves contemporary Maori artists."

He recalls the hui as peaceful occasions: "We just wanted to show them where we were at. There was no heavy philosophy.

"We would show our work. It was another way of saying, 'We might be in the depth of the Pakeha art world but we have never really left you'."

In a 1991 interview Matchitt told Herald feature writer Pat Baskett: "In a way the hui is a polarisation. You have a dilemma if you 'culturalise' something.

"But even at the first meeting we had European and Pacific island artists were present. For me the door is wide open for anyone to come to the party."