Feathers create stylish pieces

By FEDERICO MONSALVE

Artist Moana Nepia has had a multiplicity of lives.

He spent five years at medical school, a decade as dancer and choreographer for the Royal New Zealand Ballet, was Australian national scrabble champion in 1986, has been an interior decorator, dance teacher and is an artist who graduated with honours from the Wimbledon School of Art in London.

He is equally happy talking about Maori cosmological narratives and continental postmodern philosophy - and is relaxed when he hears critics sometimes say his work rests between art and decorative pieces.

"Tell me who they are," he says with a mix of disdain and laughter. "It doesn't bother me really. It seems to me they are looking at the craft and handiwork that goes into traditional aspects of my art, but I don't see a problem with it being considered decorative."

Nepia is a relative newcomer to the art world, having started exhibiting in 1998. Nonetheless he was commissioned to undertake a piece last year for the Qantas terminal at Heathrow Airport and British Airways' Singapore terminal.

He has exhibited extensively in London and had a solo show at the BartleyNees Gallery in Wellington.

The artwork Nepia is bringing to the Milford Galleries shows his depth of knowledge.

Nepia confronts issues of traditional art and gender and the social and artistic machinery that puts it in context, in a slyly ethereal and pared-back way.

At first sight his pieces seem to explore colour and repetition, reminiscent of high modernism, with their chequered motifs and patterns.

But closer inspection reveals the textures are the result of hundreds of coloured feathers (some dyed, some natural, all of them glued rather than woven) that burst in a choreograph of colour, shades and movement.

Nepia says his feather pieces are about more than just reworking the feather cloak. "I guess some of my background as a dancer influences the movement aspect of my pieces," he says, "but my preoccupations extend beyond that."

Nepia, who is Ngati Porou, explains that Maori cosmological narratives have several explanations for "nothingness". Likewise, he wishes to explore infinity in a similar way.

"One of the pieces is a curtain made out of thousands and thousands of beads. It is set in an eight shape, or the infinity symbol, and people can stand inside it rather than walk through it."

Nepia comes from a background of rugby players (Everard Jackson, his grandfather, was an All Black, among many other successful rugby players along his lineage) and he has also started looking at rugby balls as art objects.

"I am looking at how the masculine is constructed in New Zealand, and this ongoing idea of the game as a religion."

By making the pigskins out of feathers and other media he makes a direct and rather obvious scrutiny of masculinity, the stereotypes of the game and, with a wicked gleam in his eye, mocks them both a little.



This multi-talented artist also teaches dance in Auckland and is working on a choreograph with the Wellington dance troupe Footnotes.

Ake! ake! ake! (forever, forever, forever), the last sentence in the Lord's Prayer and the words uttered by Rewi Maniapoto as he declined to surrender Orakau Pa, is the title of Nepia's exhibit at the Milford Galleries and, in a sense, he surrenders nothing in his struggle to create, in whatever form he chooses.

"Some people have called my work obsessive," Nepia says with a laugh. Go figure.

* Ake! Ake! Ake!, Milford Galleries, February 26-March 17.