Chris Heaphy's vibrant paintings collage colonial imagery with symbols and portraits of traditional Māori history, offering a complex web of associations that are open to interpretation.
Read MoreHeaphy's melding of different cultural iconography is iterated powerfully in Walk this Way (2007). Characteristic of his paintings from this period, a collage of forms fills the outline of Mickey Mouse, a global symbol of childhood frivolity. Early 20th-century Māori and colonial symbols—boots, pipes, skulls, guns, skeletons, Māori heads, ruru—are intermingled with playing card symbols, an allusion to the Tuhoe prophet Rua Kenana, who adopted the symbols in his early 20th-century temple Hīona at Maungapōhatu in the Urewera.
Heaphy's fascination with Māori prophets is manifested here in a satirical image that communicates the impacts of colonisation and imperialism. The loss of culture and innocence in the face of Aotearoa New Zealand's colonial history is reinforced through the repetition of the skull motif, especially as it substitutes Mickey's nose. Heaphy's mixed imagery suggests these connections but also reveals that our interpretation of signs is always contentious.
From the 2010s onwards, Heaphy's painted inventory of signs and symbols became more specific, often compositionally streamlined into horizontal swathes that communicate a directional energy. These works retain his vibrant colour palette but now merge imagery into more naturalistic settings. In works like Whistlejacket (2016), a central motif (here, the famous British racehorse) is painted in silhouette, surrounded by smaller icons of cross-cultural exchange. Women in crinolines ride Whistlejacket's back, while the heads of Māori warriors in profile are scattered across the composition. Introduced species such as dogs and rabbits skirt the canvas, and stylised indigenous fauna makes a patterned ground for Whistlejacket to rear from. Heaphy stacks these compositions with layers of silhouetted icons, all of which hint at the historical potential for cultural misunderstandings, reinterpretations, and transformations of meaning.
Constantly in flux, the semantic value of his imagery draws on a legacy of colonialism and conservation, often juxtaposing indigenous and introduced species. In works like Matuku Hurepo Waits (2017) and Toutouwai Waits (2016), the eponymous native birds are swarmed by symbols of colonisation—flagpoles, warriors in profile, ladders, walking sticks, weapons—as if to warn us of the impending threat of their extinction. In this way, Heaphy bridges centuries of symbolic communication to offer a collection of tangled references that reflect our contemporary concerns.
