Two days after Graham Tipene received his own tā moko, he went to the podiatrist.
He entered the waiting room and there was an audible gasp. Tipene took a seat, picked up a newspaper, and raised it high in front of his tattooed face.
“I could feel the burden on me.”
And then he heard his mother: “She came down to haunt me. ‘Put the paper down. This is a forever decision - it is not a pair of shoes’.”
Tipene is a tā moko artist. The first skin he inked was his mother’s.
“She was scared, I was scared. It was a small piece. It took an hour and a half and she was crying. Not because of the pain, but because everything she had tried to instil into me came to a head at that moment.
“The goal was to do her chin, but then she got sick. I explained to her that as soon as she came out of hospital, I would do her kauae. But she never came out. Every kauae I do, I think of it as paying homage to my mum.”
He says this during our second interview, a phone call to finish off a conversation that had begun in Tipene’s home near Ōrākei Marae in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.
Back then, he made two cups of earl grey tea and - like everyone else in the city that day - we talked about the weather. Forty minutes and 40 millimetres of torrential rain later, a civil defence alert cut the interview short.
Water, water everywhere.
It reminded Tipene (Ngāti Whātua, Ngāti Kahu, Ngāti Hine, Ngāti Haua, Ngāti Manu) of the January floods. On that day, he had crisscrossed the city to collect his family, avoiding all the roads that he knew traversed ancient waterways.
“Knowledge of your landscape dictates what you do in these moments.”
That knowledge also dictates his art. You may not have heard of Tipene, but to live in Tāmaki Makaurau is to live with his vision. If you’ve driven through the Waterview Tunnel, walked or cycled across Albany’s Tirohanga Whānui Bridge or visited any number of libraries, you’ve seen his work.
Tipene is Auckland’s go-to-guy for large scale public projects.
He’s lost count (“20 or 30?”) but the most recent - and one of the central city’s most visible - is on the Wellesley Street East side of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.
Six massive decorated panels adorn the recently shrink-wrapped historic building. The artwork - 12 metres high and a total 35 metres in length - will be in place for at least the next year while the gallery undergoes roof repairs and earthquake strengthening.
The work is called Te Toi o Mangahekea and it features six interlocking spiral designs or takarangi (“taka” meaning to fall and “rangi” the sky) that address the cyclical life of water, from sky to lake to river to sea to sky.
“They represent male and female; Ranginui and Papatūānuku, the Waitematā and the Manukau, the two harbours surrounding the gallery and finally, east and west, the coastal waters, thereby covering the whole motu,” says Tipene.
At his kitchen counter, the week before the panels were hung, Tipene put pen to paper and demonstrated some of the patterns in the spirals - taniwha teeth, fish scales, maunga and the aerodynamics of a waka stern. Kape rua kōwhaiwhai designs symbolise the passing on and transfer of visual knowledge. Curving vertical lines between the spirals refer to Te Ara Tāwhaki (the path of Tāwhaki to baskets of knowledge in the heavens). Interrupting whakarare patterns depict disruption and change.
The panels went up in the small hours of May 18. And the reaction so far?
“Some people go ‘oh, it looks amazing, that’s really nice colour or line work’ or whatever. I think I love it for a different reason. I’m loving it, because our kids get to see themselves through something else.”
And that’s a view that, he says, was not available to his generation.
“Growing up, there was nothing. You could walk through Auckland and it could be any city, anywhere. But today? Oh, there’s something, and there’s something else and there’s something else. Whether you like it or not, it’s there. And whether you like it or not, we’re here.”
Tipene was just a kid - he thinks maybe 8 or 9 years old - when he started drawing tattooed faces.
His mum was the caretaker at Gladstone Primary School and she’d send him ahead to unlock the junior classroom block. He used the spare moments after to draw. What came out was mataora.
“It’s what my hands just automatically expressed at the time. My mum was always trying to instill in me the value of knowing home, of knowing myself. The value of our language, the value of understanding that being Māori is not as bad as those idiot kids in your classroom say it is. So there was all that stuff, when I went to do that first mataora, that first face.”
And then, he says, his mum took him to a bookbinding factory and asked for the offcuts.
“We had a room full of paper that I was just allowed to use however I wanted to use. That was my mum being clever.”
Mere Tipene (nee Raharuhi) was “my mother who raised me”. She was best friends and a first cousin to his birth mother, Marlene Colqhoun (nee Davis) who had, originally, planned to terminate her pregnancy. Both are gone now, aged, respectively, just 58 and 60.
“My mother who raised me always told me who my parents were, so that it wasn’t a surprise as an adult. She knew the importance of being really clear about it.”
His moko, received during Matariki 2019, honours his parents.
“When my parents who raised me both passed, I had a commitment to take on the markings ... especially my mum and her teachings.”
Has it changed him?
“The only thing on this side of the needle, is the way we hold ourselves in public. That’s the biggest change. I have a responsibility. The thing I wanted to do was wear moko, wear mataora, and now I have a responsibility to mataora. How I hold myself will reflect my people, the history of the markings ...
“It’s sort of about being responsible to the markings by doing things like making sure we’re not doing things like sitting in bars till all hours getting drunk. How we interact with our families. How we teach our children and our children’s children. How we hold ourselves accountable. We know and understand that by being accountable, then future generations will be able to hold the marking in the correct way.”
And also, perhaps, his partner won’t be approached by a stranger in an airport who, noticing she had arrived with two tattooed men, waited until they were at the counter checking a ticket before approaching to ask if she was ok.
Her response: “I was ok until you came over here!”
It was weird, says Tipene, graciously.
“We’re undoing the stuff that was throughout the news in the 70s, 80s and early 90s. We’re flipping the script on all of that stuff. It’s our job to educate, to inform - to just be nice people!”
Tipene (who founded Te Wheke Moko Studio Design) says moko acknowledge past kōrero and history. The civic art projects - the mahi toi he’s involved in around the city - are an extension of that work. Not everyone will be able to read every level of meaning in his designs but that doesn’t matter, he says.
“Even though you don’t understand the piece itself, you understand there’s a connection to local iwi. And I think that’s a beginning point.
“Let’s say someone arrived here yesterday from Birmingham. They’ll say ‘oh, that’s a Māori design’. Those of us who have been living here long enough will know that it’s probably to do with an iwi that’s connected to this part of town. And then the next step is ‘oh yeah, that’s definitely a Ngāti Whātua design’.”
Sometimes, when he speaks to students about his work, he asks them: Is this art, or is it tikanga in practice?
“And they say it’s tikanga in practice. Look at our whare tipuna. Its practical use was shelter, but it is also used as a teaching tool. Our design work is in there so we can talk to our kids. ‘These are your ancestors and this is the connection between this person and this person. It just so happens that the pou we’re talking to is a support beam’. Art and engineering. Same thing!”
The gallery work is a korowai - a cloak that is sheltering the workers. An upcoming private commission for a downtown building depicts the city’s reclaimed foreshore - and illuminates according to the ocean tides (“if it’s glowing, then 200 years ago you would have been wet”). In Myers Park, he’s working on a piece that will sing back to you, if you first sing the right words in the right note.
“Most art you stand in front of and look at. This one, I want you to stand inside of ... and it will go inside of you. It’s a totally different way of thinking, of experiencing Māori design and Māori thinking. We just wanted to push those boundaries.”
If he could do anything to anything, what would he do?
“Oh ... " he says (and I fear this one of those dumb questions, too big to answer on the spot).
“Māori design and engineering,” he eventually replies. “Making the thinking around that different. So when buildings are created, there is no mistaking there is Māori design thinking in the engineering. For instance, putting a Matariki viewing platform on our sky scrapers. That’s what I would do ...
“It’s not about doing ‘our’ stuff and not doing other stuff. It’s just about integrating us into the landscape, into the city build, into everything.”
What if it was the other way around? What if skyscrapers had to fit into the Māori landscape?
“Yep,” he says. “Bingo. And I think we’re going to get there one day. What we’re doing now is playing catch up. Once we have caught up, and there is equality, then we move into the next phase which is looking at how we interact with the landscape, as opposed to changing the landscape.”
He knows there are critics who see the integration of Māori design into civic projects as “box ticking” - and others who won’t think it goes far enough. Once, he says, he had to defend a design against a Facebook poster who didn’t like a colour he had used. She told him, authoritatively, “Māori didn’t have a traditional blue”.
Tipene laughs. “Mate, if I had a cry every time someone had an opinion, I’d be permanently in the fetal position on the floor over there.”
What the critics don’t always understand, he says, is the “massive process” that sits behind the projects he is commissioned to work on.
“To be able, for example, to put more Māori design on the outside of the art gallery. The intention was pure. They really wanted to try and figure it out. So, yeah - proud of them.”
Also: “If my tīpuna wanted to have a relationship with the newcomers, then who am I to s*** on that relationship now? I am to maintain the hopes and dreams of my ancestors by making sure I do right by them. And then, in turn, doing right by our kids and the future generations, so that my grandkids can walk forward with all these other kids and go ‘yeah, we’re united in thought. We’re equals’.”
In 2021, Tipene was one of six contemporary Māori artists whose work featured in an exhibition at the Keepers Cottage in Auckland’s Albert Park - once a site of Māori settlement.
He gave live tā moko demonstrations and, at the time, told the Herald he was aiming to “realign [Māori] with this historical space . . . our mission is to re-indigenise the space”.
Today he says “that’s an easy way to describe a hard thing”, but agrees the Art Gallery project could be considered in the same way.
“The gallery is very English in its look. Having this work around it is like saying ‘don’t forget we’re here’.”
Tipene, 45, has four children, aged between 23 and 8 years old and one grandchild. His partner Caprice Kerrison is a hair and make-up artist with Whakaata Māori. Their home is bilingual.
When whānau tell him “I saw your stuff” he tells them “that’s your stuff”.
“We have to encourage them being them, everywhere they go. Not just at the marae, not just in the classroom. They have to be strong Māori whoever they are, wherever they are. If my work helps 9 year olds go ‘oh cool, that’s Māori - I’m Māori’ then that’s a big box tick for me.”
Tipene’s mum went on to become a te reo Māori teacher; his dad was a native speaker. He grew up learning Māori “and then got deeper into it at college”, studying Māori art and design at AUT University. The marks that he’s made on this city come, he says, from a lifetime of living in it and being connected to it.
As often as he can, Tipene gets up before the sun rises. He heads to a high point or the ocean. Some people go to the gym or eat healthily. Tipene chases the dawn. It started during the first Covid lockdown and now, he says, it’s his thinking time and a medicine space.
“Almost 50 years of living in this bloody city,” he reflects. “Being dragged around by the ear to your Nan’s house and your Aunty’s house and being on the marae and sitting with old people and learning by osmosis and then realising, as an adult: That stuff is important.”
'You don’t want to be doom and gloom your whole life. That's just a miserable way to live'