Food for thought

Steve's Fish and Chip Shop, Wellington, 1969. Photo / Supplied

When you grow up in a tiny end-of-the-road community in the heart of Te Urewera, the river and the bush become your supermarket. So says Ngahiraka Mason, now a curator at the Auckland Art Gallery, then a bright-eyed barefoot kid who helped her whanau gather in the haul. "I never ate anything from a can or knew what a Coke bottle was until I became an adult," she smiles.

As curator of the gallery's current exhibition Taste: Food & Feasting in Art, Mason has the opportunity to express her personal vision of what food means to us as a culture. But she didn't always get to select from the gallery's vast collection. Rather, her first job here was as security guard. "I was completing a fine arts degree at Elam and thought that by standing around art I could learn by osmosis," she explains. "It was not even on my horizon that I would one day be a curator."

But she didn't reckon on the motivation and mentorship of the then curator of historic New Zealand art, Roger Blackley. "He knew the value of keeping the security staff sweet," she jokes. "He talked to me about a few projects and was very open to discussing my ideas."

Mason made the move to gallery guide and in 1999 curated her first show based around the Urewera Mural by Colin McCahon, a somewhat controversial triptych which was stolen from the Aniwaniwa Visitor Centre and later returned.

It was a significant start to her career and a fitting one. "I'm from Te Urewera so I put my hand up for the project."

Apposite, too, is her involvement in Taste. "It's well known that curators love to cook and share recipes," she explains. Indeed, cookbook author Alexa Johnston, whose Ladies a Plate is a best-seller, is a former fellow staffer. "When gallery work is involved, conversations often start around a dinner table, not by phone or email."

That food is integral to communication is a given but so immense was the subject matter that Mason spent 18 months defining and refining the plan for the exhibition.

"I would have liked to have included items lent from the museum," she says, "calabashes used by Maori for preserving birds and Polynesian grating stools for coconut, for instance."

Although these aren't part of the parcel, the result is nevertheless rich in terms of historical relevance, an experience that is moving, instructional but most of all, good fun.

"This is our summer exhibition so it had to appeal to a broad range of people, especially families," says Mason.

For starters, kids and adults alike will love the edible artwork, an interactive piece by Robert Jahnke that spells out the word "koha" in chocolate fish. "Koha is a reciprocal gift," explains Mason. "This was the artist's tongue-in-cheek response to the fisheries bill passed in the late 90s." Gallery staff have to replenish the chocolate fish at the end of each day as visitors are encouraged to eat them.

Children will no doubt also be drawn to the giant crocheted octopus by Ani O'Neill that occupies the centre of a room dedicated to fishing. Baby octopuses clamber on the ceiling. The artist has used recycled wool and stuffed the sea creature with empty plastic water bottles as a comment on sustainability.

Photographs of Niue fishermen by Glenn Jowitt offer some character and colour. "They may seem simple but in order to get these shots, Glenn had to develop a relationship with the people. This is not a posed set-up - it's a documentation of life," she says.

Marti Friedlander's black-and-white images of the fledgling winemaking industry in West Auckland anchor the other side of the room. They showcase the value of what we inherited from immigrants. "We celebrate sport but we don't celebrate our culinary heritage enough," remarks Mason.

It's a failing that this exhibition sets out to rectify. Gil Hanly photographs of lifting a hangi are supplemented in the interactive kids' guide by a recipe of how to prepare one. This knowledge courses through Mason's bloodstream. "When I grew up, I worked in the garden and orchard and helped with the harvesting. I knew where my food came from - I loved all the different textures and flavours. I ate it all so I must have been the perfect child!"

A morsel of almost everything appears in this show - it's a veritable smorgasbord of artistic flavour. From the quintessential - such as the Tapper painting of a public bar in New Zealand in 1968 - to the quirky, like the 70s movie directed by Ed Ruscha that depicts a male building a salad on his dingy hotel room bed and inviting a female companion to lie on it while he pours dressing over her. "It was very avant-garde in its time."

From the historical, such as a display of Aunt Daisy cookbooks and dinner menus featuring desserts like "bombe Rangitoto", to the whimsical - a pavlova in the shape of a radio cassette player in fibreglass and resin by Weta Workshop - it's all here.

"I wanted the exhibition to be full of surprises and colour, a mix-and-match of all sorts."

One of the most recognisable works must surely be the 1975 painting of the Maketu fish and chip shop by Robin White. "It's our most requested reproduction," explains Mason. Anyone for kai?

•Taste: Food & Feasting in Art is at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tamaki until February 14, 2010. Admission is $7 for adults or $15 for a family pass. Under 5s free. See www.aucklandartgallery.com