When I started making this work, I was thinking of the tukutuku panels I saw as a kid, and ones since then. They indicated the ancestor and some identification that noted their renown. I liked the toka. It seems better to me - to make and to create.

My favourite Tukutuku were the ones with text. They let me read the assignation, and later find out meanings, in the hope of understanding. Looking, let the meaning of their forms start to become familiar, and I can say I still practice matching the interpretations that I’ve found to what I’ve seen.

This homage to Godzilla - a simulacra - a rebuke against an unprecedented destruction who enacts whakautu through the simulation of destruction. A question could be, what or who is all that for? For nature or for the national sense of loss from Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and all the fire bombings that took so many?

Perhaps as an image Godzilla was an 'impetus', to modernise and capitalise the Japanese industry, maybe as a mechanism of war, or more likely as a mechanism that sought to grow against that destruction. In order to guard against the same direction, and protect against that destruction by creating a protective structure for a future form of a people.

Ron Brownson, a Curator at the Auckland Art Gallery, mentioned while discussing the work of a Samoan Painter. And how he had embedded and hidden the forms of his people, amongst tapa-esque patternations. He said the artist called them Defensive and Protective Methodologies.

There are many things that I would add that might further flesh out that type of practice amongst indigenous peoples, but I wont here.

I was on that tour, as an employed guide listening to an long entrenched curator. The sense I got from his talk was that people who were (or who are still affected by that type of power). The type, that force you to hide or mask yourself so that your people will be safe. That maybe a culture had to face another intent on destroying you or your entire culture. Just as the Japanese experienced, at the end of WW2, or the Jews during that war, or like Māori have experienced, through Grey and before Grey and after Grey.

There are commonalities, between how we as people across the world have been affected by similar but discordant pasts, and then how generations later we try to deal with those issues.

Before talking about Defensive and Protective Methodologies, via the Samoan Artist whose work was displayed large across a main gallery wall. Mr Brownson talked about a photograph, a small framed work. A dark skinned fist held int he air, a muted brown photograph of a raised fist. It wasn’t a gang sign, it was a photograph that looked like it recorded an act of defiance. He commented on how the photograph - was a weak fist.

If you had met Mr Brownson, then you might think that him being able to ascertain that it was a weak fist, would be something outside of his domain. But maybe someone Mr Brownson knew had ascertained that for him.

In the wake of so much history and destruction how can anyone start to think about how to rebuild? Or build?

I think it’s best to just make and then make some more, and then look to each iteration, as a forward step. As there are no proven steps to figure solutions to problems that are this dark.

There is the dark.

And there is moving away from that all encompassing, and stalling ‘hate’, which may have come from others, or that may still be harboured. And that needs time to balance, so that one can move toward what is valued.