Ngarino Ellis: We draw strength from our art

There was a good chance that Ngarino Ellis would end up working in the art world, having been raised by artist parents, though she started out studying law and even working as a lawyer for a short time. Fortunately for art history, she was talked into changing course by one of her teachers, Ngahuia Awekotuku.

Ngarino’s most recent work — in collaboration with Deidre Brown and the late Jonathan Mane-Wheoki — is the monumental, 600-page landmark book Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art, which won this year’s award for Illustrated Non-Fiction at the Ockham book awards. Here she is having a kōrero with Dale.

 

Kia ora, Ngarino. Let’s start with your whakapapa and your names. Can you talk us through your family history?

My father was Robert Ellis, who was an artist. He was from Northampton, England, and he came over in 1958 to escape being redrafted into the British Army. He worked at the University of Auckland, teaching art at Elam. Every five years, when he was on a sabbatical, we’d go and spend a year with our English grandparents. We became very close with them. I get emotional now because my son holds my grandfather’s name, Frederick, who passed away a week before my son was born. That’s my English side.

On my mother’s side, I am Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Porou, and I’m proud of being both. That connection came through a marriage between my grandmother, Emere Kaa, and my grandfather, Walter Mountain. One of her brothers was Pekama Kaa, who led the Pioneer Battalion and died in Europe in 1917. Emere was a student at Hukarere at the time, and she always talked about hearing the whistle of the train as he left. He would send her things during the short time that he was in Europe, letters and so forth, which she cherished throughout her whole life.

Nanny had 12 brothers. Some became soldiers, some were in the 28th Māori Battalion, some of them were priests. And although we didn’t go back to the East Coast as often as she wanted to, we certainly had a very strong whanaungatanga, as Ngāti Porou, here in Auckland. We might have 10 or 15 cousins who live in Auckland, all very proud of being from Rangitukia.

And when I wrote my PhD dissertation on Ngāti Porou carving, I did it for my Nanny, so that I would have a contribution to Ngāti Porou. The dissertation became a book, which I launched at Ō Hine Waiapu marae in 2016 with my uncle Wiremu Kaa, who was a writer and academic himself.

It was important for me that we had the book launch on the Coast, and we had a beautiful day where around 100 pakeke came. So that’s my Ngāti Porou side, where I just talk a lot and I’m quite loud!

My other side is Ngāpuhi, which is where my name comes from. I’m named after my grandfather’s mother, whose full name was Nga Taiapa Rino o te Poka o Whata Paraoa. She died in 1948, and during her life, she shortened her name to Ngarino.

I was born in Kawakawa. I have a twin sister, Hana, and my Nanny wouldn’t let the family move to Auckland until we’d been baptised. So, we were baptised in the church across from their house on Church Street, and then we moved down to Auckland. Dad helped build a house in Birkenhead, where my mother still lives. We bought a house a few years ago, two doors down, so it’s our little enclave.

Mum was a schoolteacher, and every year over Christmas we’d go up north to Te Rāwhiti for six weeks. My dad was one of the few Pākehā who were there, and it was an idyllic lifestyle. We’d be on the beach, no sunblock in those days, and you’d just come out of the water when you were hungry. I’d get oysters off the rocks and go fishing with my grandfather. I always got really seasick. My grandfather was one of our hapū who rebuilt the marae in the mid-1970s.

With that very strong base, I didn’t even realise that I was Māori until I hit intermediate school. I just thought everyone was like me. And even though I went to primary school with mostly Pākehā, I didn’t think that being Māori was anything different until I went to intermediate school and they had a horrible colonial dress-up day. That was the moment that I realised I was different.

My parents weren’t rich by any means, and they were very careful. So no takeaways, and no movies, but that wasn’t important back then. Our life revolved around being at home.

But every five years, from the time my sister and I were 18 months old, we’d go to England, and then Mum and Dad would buy a car, drive down through France for a week, end up in Spain, stay there for three or four months, and then head back to England. It was a great lifestyle.

I love the thought of your nana hearing the sound of the whistle of the train taking her brother away, and the way she recognised that those letters were the last tangible piece of him. It’s sad to think of that, even to this day, āe?

It is sad. And, actually, within a year, her father tried to marry her off. She was 14, and the only girl in the family who lived to adulthood. She said no, and so he refused to pay for her to go back to Hukarere, so she had to leave school at 15.

Nanny’s really remarkable. She went to Rotorua and stayed there for six years, helping out at the school at Whakarewarewa. Then she went down to Christchurch to train to be a nurse, and she ended up back in Rotorua as the head of midwifery in her 30s, before moving up north on a Department of Education project where she would go to rural areas and educate Māori about health. They loved it because of her Ngāti Porou reo. The way that Ngāti Porou spoke reo and English in that generation was very proper.

Talk with us about the development of your art practice. Have you had a lifelong interest in the art world, Ngarino?

My mother, Elizabeth Ellis, was one of the first Māori to go through the Elam School of Fine Arts in the 1960s. And recently, she’s been exhibiting some of her work from that time. She’s a strong arts advocate, and we grew up doing lots of art projects at home — painting and drawing and never using an eraser.

We were taken to lots of exhibitions as kids of the ‘70s. We’d go and sit on the steps of the RKS gallery in town with the other artist kids until our parents had finished having wine and cigarettes, and then we’d go home.

Art was all around us, and when I went to high school, I found a natural home in the art room. My art teacher was Sue McBride, who was the most fantastic art teacher. I loved, loved, loved being in the art room.

I left school at 16 and went travelling for a year back to England with Mum, Dad and Hana, spent more time with my grandparents, and then went to uni. I didn’t want to go to art school because Dad taught there, so it was suggested by the Māori advisor that I do art history. I also wanted to be a diplomat, so she suggested I do law as well, and so I did both.

I got admitted to the bar, went out working for a little bit, and then started doing an art history master’s part-time, and that consumed me. Then Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, who was one of my teachers, asked whether I’d like to be a tutor for her stage one course. That put me in a bit of a bind. Should I stay with the law, which I’d gone into to help people, or should I do art history, where I didn’t think I could help anyone?

Ngahuia was pivotal in convincing me to move away from the law and into art history. I did that part-time until my youngest child turned five. He’s 18 now.

Have you used your law skills in any way throughout your career?

I think I have. Law school teaches you perseverance, how to read a lot in a short time, and analytical skills. I did an amazing paper on negotiation and mediation that I use at work and at home, which is all about understanding how people think and how they approach an argument. But I also teach a course in art history called “Art Crime,” which happens to be our most popular stage 2 and 3 paper in art history. We get 100-plus students every third year when I teach it.

I’m intrigued by your interest in carving traditions. What drew you to that?

I’d always been interested in the whare, and when I was an undergraduate, I did research on Pine Taiapa, who was an amazing 20th-century carver from Ngāti Porou. And I had interviewed Paki Harrison, who was on campus and had just opened our meeting house, Tāne-nui-ā-rangi, at Auckland University.

I was able to do another project on carving for my master’s, and when I did my PhD, I started another topic, but I wasn’t really into it. Then, a year in, I had a chance meeting with Roger Neich, who was the ethnologist at Auckland Museum. He’d written a lot of books about Te Arawa carving and other types of carving, and he suggested that I do a study on Ngāti Porou carving, because it hadn’t really been done before — and suddenly the stars aligned, and I thought, why not?

I got really fascinated with the 19th-century period. I’d done some research on 20th-century carving with Pine and Hone Taiapa, and I was interested in what happened before them. Who was their teacher, and who had taught them? There are lots of houses up and down the coast, most of them quite heavily carved. Not very big, but heavily carved.

Then, in 2007, my middle child, Hana, who was three, became very sick. My youngest, Takimoana, was only a few months old, and my eldest, Emere, was five. At the same time, Robert Jahnke finished his PhD on East Coast carving, focusing on his ancestor, Riwai Pakerau, and Dave Simmons had put out a book on Ngāti Porou carving, and I suddenly thought: “I can’t do this. I can’t be a mother to these three children who really need me, and do this project.” So I decided to down tools. But after about a year, I started writing again.

The thing that makes Ngāti Porou carving interesting is that there’s so much of it, yet there’s so little written about it, and there are so few records in terms of archival materials, in terms of people’s memories. I was interviewing people based on photographs, and that’s where I came in as an art historian. I could go into a museum, look at the pieces there, and say: “Hey, those are just like this house, or that house.”

A case study is my own whare, Ō Hine Waiapu, which is the Whānau a Takimoana house. My Nanny had been born there on the porch in 1901, so our family history goes. I saw the carvings there, and I heard that a couple of my uncles had gone into Auckland Museum and said: “Those carvings are from Ō Hine Waiapu.” One of the things that we do as art historians is to look at styles. We look at the way a hand is carved or the way that different figures interact in a carving. I saw them and said: “These are from the same house.” But unfortunately, the museum won’t do anything, because we’ve got no evidence, but that was just one kind of aha moment, if you like.

The big picture is what interests me. Tracking change and transformation and culture, and asking: “What was the role of the chief? What was the role of the artist? What was the role of the church?” The church was pivotal in the 1830s and 1840s, for carving.

Tracking all these changes through a Ngāti Porou lens was really important for me. I wasn’t Paul from Parnell or someone else. I was from the area, and I was writing our histories. And the book, A Whakapapa of Tradition, has since sold out.

The art history kaupapa asks you to look at Māori art in a global context. What makes us special as artists?

So much to unpack there.

The way that we create art for us as Māori is a way of telling our stories, remembering our ancestors, remembering our whenua, remembering those values that we hold dear — and the fact that, throughout colonisation, throughout everything that’s happening still today, we can draw strength from our art. Retaining our values and art has been a way of strategising how to keep going.

There is an Anishinaabe author named Gerald Vizenor who helped popularise a term called “survivance”. Survivance is active survival for Indigenous peoples. It looks at different strategies that Indigenous groups globally have used to keep going. And one of those is art.

In the last chapter of Toi Te Mana, I talk about this concept of survivance and the ways that our artists have kept our art forms going, but always changing, because change is typical of us as Māori.

Over the past generation, more Māori have moved onto the international stage through exhibition-making, through internships, through working with other Indigenous peoples, and it’s been a win-win. Māori have learned techniques like ceramic making, which we used to practise, but not as much as Native Americans. We reinvigorated those forms, thinking about the use of dyes and different techniques.

For many people, art history began with an Italian man named Vasari, who wrote about his mates in the 16th century, but that’s very Eurocentric. It’s very gendered. I’ve always argued that art history is everywhere. Art history has been made and appreciated and thought about in communities for thousands of years.

We had people who were curators, so at the end of some tangi, there would be a display of cloaks that they were curating. They were deciding which to hang, and where they should hang, and which ones would go best next to the other ones. We had collectors, rangatira who would collect different treasures.

What we have to say from here, from Aotearoa, is really important in terms of the contribution it can make to art history globally. And just as I had to learn German terms and Italian terms and French terms in art history, so they can learn our terms. Why wouldn’t they? Because it helps you to understand what you’re looking at, and to think about the social context and the political context.

I’m looking through some of your contributions to hui and conferences here and overseas, and it’s fascinating, the range of things that have gone through your mind through your career. From the politics of moko, travelling the paths of tīpuna whakairo, world domination of Māori art history, self-portraiture, sex and power, and Māori carving, looting and theft, whakapapa and tradition, and now, of course, Toi Te Mana.

Can you speak of the pride you feel in having completed the book, because it was a labour of love across more than a decade?

It sure was. It was 12 years in the making. We were fortunate to get a grant from the Royal Society Marsden Fund, the Humanities Fund, which ironically stopped funding humanities projects like this a few months ago, and that enabled us to take time off from teaching to focus on the project.

Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, Deidre Brown and I hadn’t worked at the same campus before, and suddenly there was a moment that we were all together, and we began to think: “What if we wrote this book? What if we reached right out beyond what we could see, to think about the textbook we wish we had had when we were students?”

So, we started thinking really big picture about what could be included. We knew we had to have moko, we knew we had to have textiles, whakairo, architecture, right up to the present day. But then we also had our own little passion projects running alongside, and so we wanted to put all of that together. We were fortunate that our publisher, Sam Elworthy, at Auckland University Press, was equally ambitious for us and for the project. He could see what it would look like. We, not so much.

We divvied up what we wanted to do, and then Jonathan became very sick, and it soon became apparent that he wouldn’t be able to contribute what he wanted to contribute. (He died in October 2014.) But we have been lucky to include a chapter of his writings, and we’ve included another text from him, and he’s also been alongside us the whole way, which has been just brilliant, remembering his high standards and what he was interested in.

Writing can be hard work. Deidre counted up eight different editors along the way, which can be slightly demoralising, because you kind of second-guess your own writing, but we kept going. Deidre and I write differently — we come at it from different backgrounds. So, while we wanted a similar kind of tone, we also were determined that we would have our own perspectives within our chapters.

This is the biggest project we’ve both worked on, and the biggest project Auckland University Press has worked on. And it’s very much our perspective of art history. We encourage others to think about writing their perspectives on this history.

It must be tremendously satisfying to have brought the book to completion. What’s next for you?

Five years ago, I was fortunate to get another Royal Society Marsden grant, this time to look at Māori adornment. That’s taken me back into archives, back into museums, back into exhibitions, looking at the history of our adornment. Not kākahu, not textiles, but detachable adornments that we wore through piercings everywhere, that we wore on our skin.

It’s become my new obsession. I’ve just finished a text on how we would mark the skin. I’m writing a piece with my sister about rei puta, which are whale bone adornments that were worn around the neck.

I wish you well with that. You mentioned your sister, Hana, and it’s lovely to think of you working alongside her. Is she an art historian too?

No, she’s a family court judge.

Oh, wow!

She was appointed five years ago. She’s had a long career primarily out at South Auckland working in family law, but also criminal law and mental health. She was appointed as one of a new group of Māori judges coming through.

We’re not identical, but lots of people think we are. We’ve got a very East Coast Naati look which is kind of the tan skin and the green eyes.

Mum’s still with us, of course. Is the old man still alive, Ngarino?

No, he passed away in 2021. He was 92, and he’d had a fall, and then that was kind of the end of it — and this was during the hard lockdown. He’s buried up north next to my grandparents, which is fitting. We did a kawe mate for him a couple of years ago, Mum, Hana, the kids and my husband Nepia, back to Northampton, and put a plaque on his parents’ grave in Northampton to remember his association and growing up there.

Mum was just named Senior New Zealander of the Year for her arts advocacy. She is chair of the Wairau Māori Art Gallery, and lots of other things, and she’s got a new passion project, Māori Art Museum of Aotearoa, MAMA.

She’s amazing, and so are you. Thanks so much for sharing some time with us, Ngarino. It’s been a privilege celebrating your contribution to the Māori art community.

 

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

You can read more about Toi Te Mana in this review by Kennedy Warne.

E-Tangata, 2025