The Narrative of Making and Making Narratives

Warwick Freeman and Kim Paton in conversation on Hook Hand Heart Star at Die Neue Sammlung – The Design Museum

Artworks by Warwick Freeman
Introduction by Victoria McAdam
Photographs by Sam Hartnett

BIOS

Warwick Freeman (b.1953, Nelson) began making jewellery in 1972. As a prominent member of Auckland Jewellery Co-operative, Fingers, he was at the forefront of a rethinking of New Zealand contemporary jewellery practice that began in the 1980s. He has exhibited internationally since that time. In 2002 he was made a Laureate by the Francoise van den Bosch Foundation based at the Stedelijk Museum. In the same year Freeman received a laureate award from the Arts Foundation of New Zealand. In 2014, Freeman co-curated the exhibition Wunderrūma, with jeweller, Karl Fritsch. Wunderrūma was presented at Galerie Handwerk in Munich, and on its return to New Zealand at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

Freeman has also been involved in governance and curatorial activities: in 2004 he became the inaugural Chair of Objectspace, a public gallery dedicated to the exhibition of craft, design and architecture. His works are held in public and private collections in New Zealand and internationally including the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, the V&A, London, the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, LACMA, Los Angeles, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Kim Paton has been the Director of Objectspace since 2015. Her interest is in interdisciplinary exhibition making across the fields of craft, design, architecture and contemporary art. Paton has curated and written extensively on object-based art forms, including for the new Warwick Freeman monograph Hook Hand Heart Star, published by arnoldsche Art Publishers. Paton is the co-editor of the publication The Chair: A story of design and making in Aotearoa (2024), and co-authored the book Contemporary Jewellery in Context, published by arnoldsche Art Publishers (2017).

At 19:00 on Friday 14 March, a retrospective exhibition on Aotearoa New Zealand jeweller Warwick Freeman opens at Die Neue Sammlung – The Design Museum at Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. Across five decades Freeman has built a lexicon of signs: from the cultural symbolism of the hook and the star to the heart redrawn in the volcanic scoria of Rangitoto Island in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. When worn, his jewellery communicates something of who we are and how we have lived in Aotearoa.

Presented in Munich, where Freeman has forged enduring connections and received inspiration from the jewellers, galleries and initiatives that sustain this city as a centre for contemporary jewellery, the Hook Hand Heart Star exhibition and publication are a koha for Munich, its people, and the international jewellery community. Woven through this project are decades of exchange across hemispheres and the spirit of an ongoing collaboration – between Munich and Aotearoa, Die Neue Sammlung and Objectspace, and Freeman and curators Petra Hölscher, Kim Paton and Bronwyn Lloyd. Ahead of travelling to Munich for the launch of Hook Hand Heart Star, Kim and Warwick sat down to talk about the development of the show, from defying the chronology to identity and endurance.

KP – Kim Paton
WF – Warwick Freeman

KP:
We’re sitting here a month before Hook Hand Heart Star launches in Munich – a project we’ve been in near daily conversation about for three years, and I had this moment the other day where I realised that how I see this show and how you see it can’t be the same thing, because you’re in it and I’m sitting on the edge making meaning of it. So, I thought we could focus this kōrero (conversation) around the myth making exercise of a survey exhibition, the mythologising that is in your work and practice, and maybe do some myth busting together?

The idea of the survey, the retrospective, is to pull things together over time – the usual impulse is to present a big body of work as though it says everything about an artist, but it’s no exaggeration to say that you have been very, very uninterested in pursuing that as a line of inquiry for Hook Hand Heart Star. And one of the ways that you’ve articulated that from the beginning is through rejecting a chronological organisation of your work. Why do you rail against the chronology?

WF:
The chronology can be incredibly undermining, you know, it sucks up the energy and presence of the now. You can abandon your normal processes of working and position the work as all behind you, ring it off, and that’s not always what is best for the work. It can leave you hanging, when you lose the ‘making’ energy, and you’re left going, what now?

KP:
Putting together this show has tested your denial of the chronology and I think that you have been proven right – that there’s a more interesting way to consider your practice. Instead, five decades of your work are arranged into thematic groupings, which gives a more accurate representation of how ideas and ways of working have been used by you over many, many years, with works revisited and recontextualised in the language of your practice.

WF:
Because of how I work, there have been moments when a work has been mis-dated, so you’re looking at it and assessing a piece 20 years outside of its production time. In those moments I’d realise that somebody might have a hard time pinning down when a work is made because it is part of an ongoing vocabulary. A piece has a cultural time and place, and there are works that signpost their position in my archive through construction methods or materials, but they can still be revisited and find relevance within my ongoing practice.

KP:
Let’s go to a signpost. If we want to mythologise contemporary jewellery from Aotearoa, we start with Bone Stone Shell, it refers to the 1988 exhibition that toured internationally, but also to a whole range of activity and exhibition making that was happening at that time.

WF:
That show and time have definitely been mythologised as a kind of founding story for Aotearoa jewellery. If you have a good founding story, it’s probably more interesting to hold onto it and embellish it than to assert that it wasn’t quite like that, but when you’re in the time there’s no manifesto or instruction manual outlining what you’re doing. Work was mostly happening in people’s isolated studios, and as makers we assessed the materials and adopted the same sort of approaches – it was quite remarkable in that. If you want to mythologise anything it should be that something was in the air. The New Zealand government’s initiative to tour Aotearoa craft internationally and their naming of Bone Stone Shell positioned the show to become part of the canon. I remember I was in the meeting where we landed on that title, it was one of those moments where you’ve been over so many options that the working title just sticks. It could have been ‘Stone, Bone, Shell,’ imagine the horror. But there was so much happening around it, through the 70s and 80s in New Zealand – the political climate, the craft movement, everything fed into it. I don’t know if the touring initiative was meant to generate tourism, but it contributed to the generation of a particular cultural identity for New Zealanders, an articulation of who we are.

KP:
Bone Stone Shell is often talked about in connection to an abandonment or rejection of Western or European jewellery traditions – as an expression of the non-precious materials movement that was dominating contemporary jewellery internationally. It’s not that straight a line, is it?

WF:
In Europe and Great Britain, the rejection of preciousness developed a sort of manifesto: no more diamonds, no more gold. There was a critique of the value and prestige attached to these materials, and the ambition was to elevate whatever alternative – rubber, paper – to the status of acceptable jewellery. We were on the other side of the world sourcing natural materials for free and overtly pointing to the fact that they were already precious. As an example, the 1981 Pāua Dreams exhibition at Fingers gallery came directly out of our government’s decision to drop the moratorium on the export of pāua (New Zealand abalone), so it would be sent offshore and come back as souvenirs that were supposed to express ‘New Zealandness.’ So, we took to making work with pāua, it was Roy Mason’s initiative originally, to kick back at what they were doing to this material.

A piece has a cultural time and place, and there are works that signpost their position in my archive through construction methods or materials, but they can still be revisited and find relevance within my ongoing practice.

KP:
The entire Bone Stone Shell exhibition was gifted into the collection of Te Papa Tongarewa, our national Museum, by the Friends of Te Papa in 1993, so again that helps with formalising the myth. It endorsed the work that you and other jewellers were doing at the time as an expression of national cultural identity, and as an important record of that moment. It also triggered the development of the contemporary jewellery collection at Te Papa. I fear that I’m talking chronologically here…

WF:
It was a particular moment in terms of identity. People would say that as Pākehā we didn’t have a culture, which was plainly wrong. It also didn’t take into account that we were in a position to create identities and were in a phase of acknowledging the colonial context of New Zealand. Michael King’s 1985 book Being Pākehā pulled out all the reasons why you can use that word to describe a person of European descent living in New Zealand, and there was debate around the use of the word. In the 80s and 90s there was a repositioning away from being a ‘people with a long – distance connection to Europe’ to being people of here, Aotearoa. The moment when jewellery joined the party of re-defining Aotearoa this was all pertinent; a lot of people were, including politicians. In the 80s we had a Labour government that was starting to close embassies in European countries and open them in Africa and the Pacific as an expression that we don’t actually live on that other side of the world–we sit South, and can be a Pacific country instead of a ex-European one. Politically and socially all that energy was coming to a head.

KP:
Pākehā is one of the thematic groupings within Hook Hand Heart Star. It’s a kind of leaping translation to use that term as the show goes into Germany. It’s incredibly complex to define Pākehā, both as a word and as a frame to consider your work, in a completely different cultural context. Through asserting its importance for your work, you’ve been incorrectly described as a kind of connector or communicator between Māori and Pāhekā.

WF:
That would be impossible. But it’s also impossible to translate a sensibility, of both a time and a place, and the nuances.

KP:
That’s where the work must stand up as a good piece of jewellery regardless.

WF:
It has to look like something you want to consider. The works’ emblematic role in communicating meaning is considerably restrained, I haven’t resorted to words anywhere. I’d sometimes name a piece with a clue, but I was never interested in attaching the narrative in an imposed way. Hook Hand Heart Star is the first exhibition that has dealt with me as a narrative maker. Prior to this, I’ve either been put in the ‘materials’ department or some ‘formal’ position. I remember an exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra where they had categorised craft works by approach and when I walked into the narrative section everything had words carved into it… I was in materials. I had a plastic ghost, a wooden face and a stone heart, so yeah, fine. But there’s always a narrative, even if it’s the narrative of the maker – Kobi Bosshard jewellery has a narrative; it’s who he is and his 60 years of practice. It’s the narrative of making. I wouldn’t say a piece of mine has a message, but it does have my intent, my narrative, and if it’s a good piece, it’ll continue to accumulate narrative in the world.

KP:
The risk for an institution in a project like this is to ‘tidy up’ the way you work. To declare that you were consciously with a great degree of rigour and forethought telling a story through your work – like your reflections on being Pākehā. The artist can end up being exalted as some ‘all knowing’ person for the time when you cast hindsight onto an archive.

WF:
I remember a colleague saying ‘we make it so that we can see what it looks like after we’ve made it.’ The sense that I don’t know what the work is yet is always there. That’s why there is never any preliminary drawing involved. I always make directly onto materials, directly onto the forms. You can draw a precise line on a piece of paper but the minute you try to interpret that onto one of the materials that I use, the material won’t behave, or something will shift. Early on I abandoned the idea of preparing on paper a concept or an idea. You don’t really want to know – if it’s going to work and how good it is – there has to be some leap of faith in the process. Then the work leaves the studio and enters the public space, and that’s when a whole other level of interpretation can take place and come back to you, positive and negative. Then you see what really endures.

KP:
Reading and misreading. That nicely lands us on appropriation. When we talk about cultural appropriation in Aotearoa, in terms of Māori practice primarily, it’s hard to not find yourself at the face of a reductive assessment – ‘this is appropriation and therefore it is bad.’ There is writing on your work that addresses appropriation, including Damian Skinner’s for Givenin 2004 and then Karl Chitham’s essay for the upcoming Hook Hand Heart Star book. Karl has a different perspective, as both a Māori and Pākehā curator and practitioner, and for him the appropriation argument doesn’t fully hold because of the way you drew forms into another context, rather than trying to hold them within a Māori context.

WF:
I instigated Damian Skinner’s work on my practice around appropriation. I’d met him and knew he was interested in my work, in part because I was Pākehā and my use of materials and forms put me a dangerous camp in his mind. Given was supposed to test my practice against Damian’s authority as a historian, but also to assess the rules of engagement – I knew the ‘appropriation’ territory was malleable, that you could push and pull in that zone, and there was dialogue going on in the arts more broadly at that time – around New Zealand painters Gordon Walters and Dick Frizzell, and others. I was open to Damian’s assessment and didn’t need to push back on it, because it wasn’t the only way of looking at it. Now we come to Karl’s essay 20 years later – and Karl offers a realistic sense for this time, but Damian’s was right for his time. Will I see that shift again? There’s no definitive text or history, it’ll keep developing. And there will always be reasons why you’re allowed or not allowed to do something according to somebody. You have to ask, is that somebody important to me that I’m going to listen to? Or, am I doing this as though I’m above the thing? Why am I doing this? Am I thinking enough?

I always make directly onto materials, directly onto the forms. You can draw a precise line on a piece of paper but the minute you try to interpret that onto one of the materials that I use, the material won’t behave, or something will shift. Early on I abandoned the idea of preparing on paper a concept or an idea. You don’t really want to know – if it’s going to work and how good it is – there has to be some leap of faith in the process.

KP:
Like you said, it is also about what endures. There are bodies of work and ways of working that might end up resting, and you know, at a particular time and not reappearing. But your influences, whether that’s Pacific adornment or found forms, they reflect you and your practice in the ‘living process’. In a state of thinking about what you’re doing and why, and being willing to be in the swampy grey area where there is openness to interpretation, depending on who is looking. Can we touch on another mythology – your relationship with Munich.

WF:
My first European exhibiting opportunities happened in Amsterdam, in The Netherlands. I had never established an exhibiting presence in Germany, but what I did have was a connection to the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, initially through Hermann Jünger, who The Goethe Institute had brought to New Zealand to give a workshop in 1982. If I travelled for an exhibition in The Netherlands, I would come to Munich to visit the Akademie. There are many personal connections tied to it, with Herman, Otto Künzli, and Karl Fritsch who later studied there, as well as others. Alan Preston and I also both exhibited in Schmuck in 1989, one of the first years for New Zealand jewellers.

KP:
You were there at the beginning of this connection between Aotearoa and Munich. You’re part of the legacy of all the activity and exchange that leads us to your exhibition today – there is another mythology for you.