Bridget Reweti -
Whenua-coloured photographs
Nā Sarah Hudson, September 2021
Bridget Reweti, 4934 - LET ME KNOW WHAT HAPPENS TO TINA, 2021. whenua coloured gelatin silver photograph
Bridget Reweti is from Ngāti Ranginui and Ngāi Te Rangi, I’ve known her for over ten years and along with our mates Terri Te Tau and Erena Arapere, we’ve exhibited all over as Mata Aho Collective. Bridget’s individual art practice is lens-based - that’s actually how we became friends in the first place, our passion for photography and mutual interest in how Māori have been represented through the lens over the last couple of hundred years. Her particular field of interest explores Māori landscape narratives and perspectives of people and places. This is often enacted through a close investigation of the personal, natural, cultural, and historical knowledge that specific sites hold.
Bridget is the 2020/21 Frances Hodgkins Fellow and opened her fellowship exhibition "Pōkai Whenua, Pōkai Moana" in August 2021. A part of this exhibition, “Summering on Lakes Te Anau and Manapouri” consists of a series containing over 40, 8x10” whenua-coloured gelatin silver photographs. Made with a large-format camera, each photograph was developed in her darkroom and then hand-coloured with earth pigments gathered and gifted from where the images were captured.
Bridget Reweti, 4985 - GOOD DECTECTIVE WORK, 2021. whenua coloured gelatin silver photograph
Before the photographic field had developed colour photography, there was a practice of hand-colouring black and white photographs to make them more ‘lifelike. Technicians would paint a thin layer of oil paint, on top of the black and white print to elevate its realistic qualities. For Māori, these types of images can still be found in some whare tīpuna. The colours sometimes seem skewed, almost dream-like; perhaps you know of a kuia with strangely pink lips or military uniforms that have been coloured a lurid green.
Just like many photographic technologies, this practice was surpassed as colour film was developed. But there are practitioners today that use the mediums of the past to unpack and rethink some of the impacts that this era of photography still has on our cultural identity today.
Bridget Reweti has been hand-colouring photographs for years. Her latest exhibition, Pōkai Whenua, Pōkai Moana, celebrates 18 months of her two-year Francis Hodgkins Fellowship, through Otago University. She is the first Māori visual artist to receive the fellowship in over 21 years and has made the most of her time spent in Dunedin since the beginning of 2020. During her fellowship, she pushed her hand-colouring skills to a new level through working with earth pigments gathered and gifted from Lake Te Anau, Lake Manapouri, and its locals.
Once it was colonialists using this technology to conquer landscapes and invent notions of national identity; today, there’s a wahine Māori behind the lens. She’s autonomous and critical, researching, spending time, building respectful relationships with the land. Ngāi Tahu author Nic Low writes about Bridget’s reciprocity in her series Summering on Lakes Te Anau and Manapouri: “Colouring the images of the whenua with the whenua itself warms the land and returns it to life. Traversing the land with whānau to make the images, warms the land as well.”
Bridget Reweti, 4850 - THATS ABOUT RIGHT, 2021. whenua coloured gelatin silver photograph
When Māori artists are supported, we have time to think deeply, extend our skill sets, reconnect with the whenua and our culture. It has a flow on effect for our communities; beautiful, meaningful and inspiring things can happen - but we need those opportunities in the first place. As the first Māori artist to receive the Francis Hodgkins Fellowship in decades, Bridget has used her position to not only push and develop her art practice - but she has also used every opportunity to speak about the gaps in Māori representation in these big institutions. I hope that this challenge is actioned across institutions who run fellowships, residencies, grants and scholarships so that more Māori artists get the opportunity to represent on a larger scale.
Bridget has generously shared an insight into her studio practice by offering a video of her hand-colouring process to He Kapunga Oneone. To accompany this video is a taonga pūoro piece by Al Fraser that was commissioned by Bridget for Pōkai Whenua, Pōkai Moana. Please also see below for the full exhibition text for Summering on Lakes Te Anau and Manapouri written by Nic Low.
Summering on Lakes Te Anau and Manapouri
Summering on Lakes Te Anau and Manapouri takes as its starting point Dunedin photographer Alfred Burton’s 1889 series Wintering on Lakes Te Anau and Manapouri. Bridget painstakingly retraced Burton’s path through the same landscapes some 121 years later, identifying the coves where he put ashore, seeing what he saw, shooting what he shot.
In reconstructing each scene like it was the scene of a crime, Bridget had a nagging feeling that something was missing. Over a summer of detective work, she reached the conclusion that what had disappeared in the original photos, what had been lost, was the land.
Bridget’s silver gelatin photographs are hand-tinted with pigments dug from the edge of the lakes and gifted by Murihiku locals. Colouring the images of the whenua with the whenua itself warms the land and returns it to life. Traversing the land with whānau to make the images, warms the land as well.
Moving beyond the disappearance of the land into the European Sublime, Summering on Lakes Te Anau and Manapouri gestures to an older set of indigenous mysteries. Ngāi Tahu are mana whenua here, with the people of Murihiku still holding deep knowledge of the place names and histories that Burton’s photography could not portray. Our histories around these lakes are full of the echoes and ghosts of our whanauka who once lived in these parts and may live here still: footprints in unlikely places, deserted campsites with still-smoking fires, a bundle of tied harakeke, never a soul in sight.
Ka tīmata a Summering on Lakes Te Anau and Manapouri ki te raupapa whakaahua o te kaikāmera nō Ōtepoti, a Alfred Burton i te tau 1889, ‘Wintering on Lakes Te Anau and Manapouri’. Ka āta māreha ana tā Bridget whai i te ara i whai kē ai a Burton ki aua horanuku i te 121 tau ki mua, e tautohutia ana ngā koko i tau atu ai ia ki uta, e kitea ana ngā mea i kitea ai ia, e whakaahuaria ana āna whakaahua tonu rā.
I tana hangā houtia o ia tirohanga anō he wāhi taihara, e tohe ana ō Bridget huatau, kua wareware kē i a ia tētahi mea. I te roanga o taua raumati, me tana mahi “rapuhara”, kua whakatauria, ko te mea e ngaro ana nō ngā whakaahua taketake, ko te whenua.
Kua whakakaurukutia ā-ringa ngā tā-whakaahua tetepe hiriwa o Bridget, ki te paru kua keria tonutia nō ngā parenga o ngā roto, kua tākohatia rānei e te iwi nō Murihiku. Mā te whakakauruku i te whenua ki te whenua tonu ka ora anō ai taua whenua. Mā te tāpoi hoki te whenua ki te taha o te whānau ki te waihanga i ēnei whakaahua, he mea whakamahana hoki i te whenua.
E puta ana ki tua i te ngarohanga o te whenua ki te Wehi o Uropi, e tohua ana a Summering on Lakes Te Anau and Manapouri ki ngā muna o te iwi taketake. Ko Ngāi Tahu tonu te mana whenua ki konei, kei te mau tonu ngā iwi ki Murihiku i te mātauranga tūturu o ēnei ingoa, o ēnei whenua e kore rawa e kitea i ngā whakaahua o Burton. Ko ō mātou tāhū kōrero e kārangaranga tonu ana i ngā pari, kei reira tonu ngā hāraunga o rātou mā i nōhia ēnei whenua, ko ngā tapuwae kei ngā wāhi kārangirangi, ko ngā noho puni kātahi anō ka whakarere, e auahi tonu ana ngā pungarehu, he pūhanga harakeke, engari anō te tangata, e kore rawa e kitea.
Nic Low
Ōraka-Aparima, Awarua, Puketeraki