Most writers begin by mentioning that Lyonel Grant is a graduate of the Maaori Arts and Crafts Institute in Rotorua, a school set up in 1966 to promote the arts of the marae and wharenui. A lot is made of the fact that Grant has practiced as a customary carver, and has two wharenui to his credit: Te Matapihi o te Rangi (1985 – 1987) in Tokoroa, and Ihenga (1993 – 1996) in Rotorua.
Much less is said about what this means, or to be precise, what these wharenui say about Lyonel Grant the carver. The first wharenui, Te Matapihi o te Rangi, follows the model that Grant was taught at the Institute. It belongs within the flowering of customary culture in the 20th century under the guiding hand of Sir Apirana Ngata, a consummate politician and cultural expert from Ngati Porou who revolutionised the building and decorating of wharenui. The second, Ihenga, is a very different kind of wharenui, in which Grant has created a visual dialogue about customary culture, the weight of tradition, and the importance of social and artistic change.
Like Te Matapihi o te Rangi, most wharenui speak about whakapapa, the ancestors, through art forms that have assumed traditional status, and are relatively unchanging. Ihenga, however, speaks of the whakapapa of art forms as well as people, self-consciously exploring the artistic heritage Grant studied at the Institute. The viability of customary art forms is negotiated and demonstrated by bringing them into contact with ideas of artistic development. Grant’s work as a carver respects the past, but argues that things don’t, and can’t, remain the same.
In this sense, the Institute isn’t really the place to start after all, since Grant’s most important characteristic as an artist is what might be called visual intelligence – an interest in conceptual questions about where he, and the art, have come from, given expression through artistic means. This perhaps has more in common with Western art traditions, and Western audience expectations of what artists make, than with the highly constrained work of customary carvers, and the conservative audience that interprets what they do.
"I believe that the general perception is that I am a carver. This has a lot to do with my training and other high-profile works that I have been commissioned to produce. But I would like to think that I am more than just a carver – a sculptor, perhaps, who can make an easy transition between classical and contemporary modes of art expression."
Robert Jahnke has called for Maaori artists to negotiate the pae, a conceptual idea that evokes a boundary between two spaces or states, and makes reference to the protocols that enable a person or thing to move from one state to another. The idea of the pae locates artistic tensions – such as the difference between customary and contemporary that Grant works with – in a Maaori context, and it gives special emphasis to the social, principally kinship, structures that make Maaori art and society meaningful and unique.
If Lyonel Grant is not a carver, then Jahnke’s ideas help explain why he is not simply or only a sculptor either. What gives his work its power is a deliberate decision to conceptually remain within a context of customary culture, and to specifically engage with this tradition in terms of what he makes, and what his work means. While the individual works might be removed from the wharenui and the marae, they still relate to the large body of styles, forms and meanings found in such places.
Lyonel Grant’s art is about negotiated tensions – between customary cultural traditions of art located on the marae, and contemporary art styles found in the gallery; between modernism and Maaori art; between different materials; between substance and space, which is an old sculptural concern.
What makes such negotiations special is that they happen within a framework that is driven by a Maaori conceptual system. Grant works outside the marae and wharenui, and yet continues to be tested by the limits and constraints of those spaces, and the concepts that govern them. This is his gift to contemporary art practice. His gift to customary culture is the demonstration that artistic change and development is as much a condition of customary contexts (the pae) as stasis, and that change doesn’t necessarily involve a loss of meaning.
Above all, Grant’s work suggests that the process of being a carver and a sculptor is ultimately a dynamic one. Or, as he would put it:
Therefore the optimum pathway must be: honour the past masters, retain one
hand on the plough, be market savvy, be able to read the grain of any given
piece of timber, be connected at 56k or better, pretend to like wine and cheese,
know that the rock drill is not a seventies band – and all this in the
name of contemporary Maaori art expression.