Veiled Legacy - Diane Prince

23 February - 25 March 2001 in the Hirschfeld Gallery
In a recent article Wellington artist Diane Prince wrote with regard to the loss of Māori land and the attempted elimination of the Māori language that ‘One of the most effective ways to silence a people is to silence its heart, its memories, its intellectual base, to cut out its tongue.’ In this new series of paintings—Veiled Legacy—Diane Prince gives voice through a dark and haunting visual language to a history of loss and protest, exploring the impact of nineteenth-century colonisation on customary Māori marriage and its effect on Māori women in particular.

The Veiled Legacy paintings find their basis in Aotearoa New Zealand’s history. In a series of 1881 parliamentary debates about the Matrimonial Property Act it was argued that as English common law supplanted Māori customary law the rights of married Māori women were brought into line with their English counterparts. Towards the end of the 1880s, Justice Prendergast ruled that all marriages, including those between Māori, fell under English common law. Whereas communal rights to the land in Māori society did not distinguish between men and women, in English law individualised land ownership saw a woman’s property become the property of her husband. Diane Prince’s conclusion is that marriage by English law effectively confiscated Māori women’s rights to their land. She comments:

‘The dream/myth of the fledgling New Zealand story as a new egalitarian society was only made possible by “liberating” the land of the native—in order to “emancipate” the lot of the white immigrant. As the “liberating egalitarian” spirit of the white politician designed a continuing cycle of legislation to eliminate the communal thread and customary law of the Māori, so too did Māori respond and organise a culture of resistance.

‘With the redefinition of the history of Aotearoa, the history of Māori is only beginning to be rewritten, and the heroes and heroines of the early Māori resistance to the judicial land-grabbing methods of the white squatters understood.’

The images in Veiled Legacy are remnants of a past of grievance, ghostly marks which almost slip away into the depths of the picture as the past slips away with sketchy records, memories and half-told stories. The empty shapes of transparent wedding dresses and veils echo in mounds of earth—pā sites which have been divided up by surveyors into parcels of land for settlers. Unravelling bridal lace sweeps like a lace lasso, a symbol of entrapment, of insidious force alienating women from the land.

At the jaws of snarling, howling dogs, the female figures are thin and stretched. Yet standing on top of their land with streaming hair and raised hands their protest is persistent. It is recorded that in Hawke’s Bay in the early 1880s large numbers of Māori women refused to enter into marriage in order to retain their land and mana. As Diane Prince states, ‘This stand was just part of the greater organisational endeavours by Māori women to assert their customary roles as leaders—both to agitate for the retention of the land, and to gain the vote in Te Kotahitanga, the Māori Parliament, and in the New Zealand Parliament.’ Veiled Legacy are images of loss and alienation, but the paintings also speak of Māori women’s ongoing strength and resilience.

Rebecca Wilson

Artist’s Biography

Diane Prince was born in 1952 and is of Ngā Puhi and Ngāti Whatua descent. A veteran of the Bastion Point land protest and an active political and social commentator on issues affecting Māori, she has also exhibited widely with work in various media including weaving, installation and painting. Her work was included in the important exhibitions Mana Tiriti at the Wellington City Art Gallery and Korurangi: New Māori Art at the Auckland Art Gallery. Prince is also well known for her set design including the sets of recent plays by Briar Grace Smith and Witi Ihimaera. Her commissioned woven waka was recently installed at Tapu Te Ranga Marae in Island Bay, Wellington.