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By Mark Amery

Matariki Festival time, marking the Maori New Year has just passed. In Auckland and Wellington month-long festivals are now seeing cultural organisations across the cities working increasingly strongly together, opening their doors to new communities, and creating impressive programmes of performance, exhibitions and workshops of Maori work.

In Dunedin it has been the seventh annual Puaka Matariki Festival, a community-involving Festival of Maori Art, with a strong focus on discussions. Website resources including a great looking podcast series. Puaka is the principal star of Ngai Tahu.

New in Wellington has been the impressive Ahi Kaa Festival of theatre and dance organised by Tawata Productions, with six very different companies working over four venues. Ten years ago the idea of a dance music-based Maori dance theatre work The Beautiful Ones (written and directed by Hone Kouka with choreography by Dolina Wehipeihana) premiering on the Circa mainstage would have sounded far-fetched.

The relationship between our contemporary arts and Matariki is getting increasingly stronger. The role of art for reflection and provocation with new ideas as a change-maker is asserted. While for example in Ahi Kaa Jamie McCaskill’s latest play Not in Our Neighbourhood considered the complexity of domestic violence in our society, Aroha White’s 2080 makes us take stock of where, with our treatment of immigrants, income inequality and climate change issues we are heading.  

Connections are being strengthened between Maori artists, iwi, institutions and the wider public, underpinning the way increasing numbers of New Zealanders are coming together as communities to reflect and celebrate Matariki. Recognising Maoritanga and a Maori world view as core to our being as a wider culture.

So, where oh where then are our Maori critics and arts journalists - those that might provide a bridge between the arts practice and a wider audience?

That the strength of the contemporary Maori arts is not met by commentary from a Maori perspective, reflects that, outside Maori channels our media reflects a Pakeha world. Yes, this is obvious even to a non-Maori reader, but it’s something we choose to ignore, to not talk about. It’s no wonder, not more Maori writers feel encouraged. It needs proactive work by editors and publishers to break the mould.

What I’m talking about isn’t just writing by Maori about art created by Maori, but Maori writers writing about the arts in general. As a Pakeha writing on Maori work, I’d like to read for once a Maori writer writing on Pakeha work.  

In the performing arts in New Zealand we don’t lack for criticism. Yet trolling through reams of criticism collected on www.theatreview.org.nz, which includes that published in the newspapers and ensures professional theatre production in New Zealand is covered, the only identifiably Maori writer I can find recently (and I look forward to being corrected) is Tamati Patawai, writing on the revival of Briar Grace-Smith’s Nga Pou Wahine. In that review Patawai writes of Grace-Smith’s “distinctly and assuredly Maori storyteller's gift.”

More common is for a new Maori theatre or dance work to be written about by a brace of Pakeha writers. This really doesn’t reflect a diversity of local perspectives, and it certainly doesn’t encourage a wider community to engage with our theatre.

The same goes for other independent web platforms for arts reviews – Auckland’s Theatrescenes, The Lumiere Reader and The Pantograph Punch (spotted there - as if to emphasise the point - an excellent review by Hautahi Kingi of the beautiful book Tangata Whenua: An Illustrated History). The New Zealand theatre annual I publish Playmarket Annual is little better.

In the visual arts only a portion of exhibitions and projects in New Zealand get written on. As critics we choose what we write about. While we pride ourselves on hunting out exceptional work, this can mean art that deals in Maori concepts with which a Pakeha writer might not feel as confident is likely to be at some disadvantage in getting coverage.

Leading New Zealand visual arts review site Eyecontact isn’t strong on Maori critics either, but very welcome writing from Wellington recently for the site is Chloe Cull (Kai Tahu). Cull writes on the site across the visual arts, but I found a recent review of the work of Ngatai Taepa at Page Blackie Gallery really opened up the work for me, both in terms of its discussion in relation to conventions of kowhaiwhai and whakairo (carving) but also - through the writer’s personal critical perspective - the work as part of the broader contemporary scene.

Ngatai Taepa’s work is currently the subject of an excellent if mixed survey exhibition at Pataka in Porirua. The accompanying catalogue features strong texts by leading Maori artists and curators Sandy Adsett, Robert Jahnke and Nigel Borell.

Taepa’s work is growing in strength. I love in recent years how it increasingly boldly speaks across cultures and traditions while still being firmly rooted in extending the kowhaiwhai pattern of mangopare. The work is rich in both its past and present references.

The complex elegant visual systems of magnificent sculpture-paintings like ‘Tane Pupuke’ and ‘Mango-Pae’ demonstrate an artist finding a distinct vision of nodes and connections with pattern. These works evoke for me an array of traditional Maori designs, but just as much express powerfully, bi-culturally, the complex web of a world where there is a need for new patterns created from reaching out to join up and enclose our diversity - to baffle the forces disconnecting us, by curling around and offering each other shelter and points of interrelation. We need our media to do similar, from a range of different connection points.

• Te Tini a Pitau: 12 years of Kowhaiwhai, Pataka, Porirua, until 6 September