Rachel Walters

Little Savages

2007

Bronze

Five new creatures inhabit a quiet swamp at Brick Bay. Some highly polished, others matt and subdued; like chameleons, they adapt to their bush surroundings. Only 25 centimeters high, Rachel Walters’ Little Savages are reminiscent of the ‘little people’ or turehu/ Patu-paiarehe found in Maori folklore. Indeterminate figures, these mythical forest-dwellers were sometimes described as the original inhabitants of Aotearoa. By drawing on Maori mythology along with western art-making traditions like the ready-made, Walter’s anthropomorphic hybrids playfully question issues of cultural and artistic ownership. They demonstrate the artist’s observation of sculpture as ‘… a metaphor in the physical…an access point where knowledge is slippery.’

Working in bronze, Walters departs from a seamlessly fluid approach to sculpting. Instead, her characters embody a curious combination of found and handmade objects. Their intentionally jarring aesthetic defies direct interpretation, toying instead with notions of the known versus the unknown, the canny versus the uncanny.

The Little Savages hint at the familiar by quoting various animal forms - pigs, swans, dogs. These literal suggestions however are disrupted by the figures’ composite nature; Sunday’s rabbit ears and Porky Pig features are bound together by creeping folds of bronze. Typical of Walters’ sculptures, these amorphous unions pitch the found object against the artist’s hand. Concerned with dialogue surrounding the artist as creator, Walters’ interest in ‘the act of making’ is informed by both ‘ancestral knowledge and instinctual feeling.’

Awarded First Class Honours and the Head of School’s prize for Contemporary Maori Art upon her graduation from the Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland in 2006, Rachel Walters works predominantly as a sculptor. She has exhibited at Michael Lett and rm103 in Auckland, Ramp in Hamilton and was recently included in the multiples cabinet as part of Prospect 2007 at the Wellington City Art Gallery.

Serena Bentley