Isolation Room: Michael Parekowhai’s The Lighthouse: Tū Whenua-a Kura

Abstract

On Wednesday, March 25 at 11.59 pm, 2020, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern placed Aotearoa (New Zealand) into lockdown to shelter citizens from the catastrophic impacts of the Covid-19 global pandemic. Entire households were placed in isolation, permitted only to travel locally to access food or medical supplies. The media messaging was resoundingly clear: stay at home. This contemporary context contributes to an analysis of sculptor Michael Parekowhai’s The Lighthouse: Tū Whenua-a-Kura (2017), a full-scale model of a State House building typology. State Houses have been lauded as symbols of Aotearoa’s ongoing commitment to the principles of egalitarianism. First produced in the 1930s under the leadership of Michael Joseph Savage’s Labour government, they were intended to house those unable to afford their own homes. However, in recent years this form of social housing and, in particular, those who have access to it have been the subject of vociferous political debate. A current housing shortage has exacerbated matters as exponential increases in accommodation costs have coincided with increases in homeless numbers in the city. These developments make Parekowhai's public sculpture particularly timely. Sited at the terminus of Queens Wharf on the Waitematā Harbour in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), the sculpture contains a single room and a single man: the eighteenth-century English explorer Captain James Cook. He is larger than life-size and adopts a penitent deportment. Cook's heroic legacy has been questioned by revisionist historians and Māori scholars who have identified a plethora of negative impacts colonization had and continues to have on indigenous communities. Cook is now under house arrest, quarantined in a prototypical State House, appearing to reflect on his actions. This paper examines how the artist assiduously reinvents this housing typology as a beacon on a prime piece of real estate. The familiarity of the exterior form is belied by the sculpture's provocative interior contents, where the artist manipulates an elaborate suite of figurative and abstract forms rendered in an array of dazzling surface treatments to shed light, both literally and metaphorically on troubling aspects of our colonial history and access to the provision of land and housing in Aotearoa. Here, at the end of the wharf, we lose our footing; we have to consider where we stand in relation to our colonial past and our contemporary relationship to whenua (land). As calamitous events unfold on the global stage that make us all turn toward our domestic interiors, the conceptual ideas that underpin The Lighthouse: Tū Whenua-a-Kura make one consider what it means to stay at home now in Aotearoa.