Collective Success

Posted: 6 September 2021

2021 is shaping up to be a fantastic year for local artist and previous Whakatane Art Gallery Curator Sarah Hudson (Ngāti Awa, Ngāi Tūhoe and Ngāti Pūkeko). Sarah is a member of the Mata Aho Collective and alongside collaborator Dr Maureen Lander, the group have just been named the 2021 recipients of the Walters Prize.

Mata Aho Collective and Maureen Lander win the Walters Prize, image courtesy of Auckland Art Gallery

Atapō, the winning piece, was commissioned by Auckland Art Gallery in 2019 for the wildly popular exhibition Toi Tu, Toi Ora which showcased the best of Māori art from the last seventy years. Made of insect mesh, muka and thread, Atapō is an exploration of Hine-titama’s journey to becoming Hine-nui-te-pō and hangs over an imposing two stories in the Grey Gallery as a part of the current Walters Prize Exhibition.

Widely considered New Zealand’s top accolade for contemporary artists, the $50,000 award is only presented every two years. In winning, Mata Aho Collective and Maureen Lander join a very exclusive club that only has eight other members across a twenty-year history.

“I learned about this prize at art school, we studied the winners, so even to be nominated was - is - massive. Collectively, for Mata Aho, it is recognition from the New Zealand art world of the work we have been doing for the last ten years. We have been recognised widely internationally for a while, but this is public recognition here in Aotearoa. It’s huge for us.”

Sarah grew up in the Whakatāne area, and her memories of enjoying art begin with her first teacher Jan Elrick at Waimana School.

“She loved art too, she was great. By the time I was at Whakatāne High School, I was really just going to school to do art and nothing else. Most of the other teachers seemed to be OK with me never coming out of the art room. My teachers were Sue Whale, who’s still involved at the high school today, and Mr Soppit. When I went on to Massey I chose to do a design degree because I thought I could make money out of it, which is hilarious to me now. My tutor pulled me aside in the first semester and said, look, you should be studying fine arts and he was right.”

Mata Aho Collective was established in 2012 when Sarah met fellow Māori wāhine postgraduate students Erena Baker, Bridget Reweti and Terri Te Tau.

“We met after uni – we all went along to this wānanga and had this shared experience of sitting in a room with other Māori art students for the first time. Up until then I had been one of two Māori students in a very mainstream institution and it wasn’t comfortable. There was no help available to us when we wanted to work with Māori concepts and materials. When Mata Aho met, we realised we all had the same interests and the same work ethic, and we started to work together straight away – we were all at similar stages of making a transition from students into the working art world and as young Māori women, joining forces meant we were stronger together.”

Mata Aho Collective presented their first work Te Whare Pora to the public in 2012, and the rest as they say, is history.

Kaokao #2 by Mata Aho Collective, installed in Whakatane Art Gallery Photo credit Troy Baker

“We never intended this to be a whole career; Enjoy Contemporary Art Space had a summer arts residency, and offered us gallery space in Wellington while they were closed for the summer. It was meant to be this one-off gig. But with a collective, we found we could achieve really big ideas and be more ambitious together. I know my own limitations but when I have others to help, we can go big. Working together for the greater good of the whole is often natural to women, and it’s an indigenous way of working too. You have to leave your ego at the door. You need to recognise that you all have different strengths, all have good values. Each member of Mata Aho has similar work ethics and expectations, and we trust each other. It’s a bit like being in a band – and just like with a band, you gotta keep practicing to be good.”

Te Whare Pora installed at Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi at Twenty, image courtesy of Adam Art Gallery.

Mata Aho Collective has a full schedule of projects for 2002-23, with lockdown meaning that Sarah is handling her part of the work from her family home in Whakatāne.

“There’s a lot of Zoom meetings going on right now! We’re in the middle of prepping a new work for Biennale of Sydney in 2022, and there are two or three other projects in the works for the next two years. I’m also working on all my solo gigs and sharing the home schooling of my six-year-old daughter as well – so super busy.”

Sarah and her husband are used to the juggle of family/life balance with working from home, so she feels lucky that lockdown hasn’t changed her circumstances a lot this time around.

“It’s easy to come up with lots of ideas during a time like this, but productivity itself can be hard for artists. Creative production is often seen as a leisure activity, and it gets pushed aside by other people’s needs, but when you are a creative it is a necessary expression. And the mental stress of Covid is always there. I’m managing the amount of information, the amount of scrolling I take on every day so I don’t stress out about the changing world. But this is what I’ve always done. I like being able to be here at home and get busy. Art is not a job - I love doing it.”