Frances Hodgkins Fellowship

The first ceramic figure Shona Rapira-Davies made in her fellowship year collapsed and disintegrated in a cloud of dust. Undaunted, she set to work making another. They do cut down the poles that hold up the sky invokes Tane, god of forests, who with his feet pushed Rangi (the sky) away from Papa (the earth), then  planted poles to keep them apart, allowing life to flourish between. The figure, although balanced and sturdy, seems vulnerable – naked, upside down, his arms sliced off. On one hand his image is of life-giving strength, the genesis of the natural world; on the other, the work refers to the clearance of our native forests: ‘Before you cut down the tree, you cut off the branches. [Truncating the arms] refers to that and the environmental issue of cutting down the trees,’ 

This figure, too, almost came to an untimely end. Rapira-Davies gifted the work to Ralph Hotere as a pou whenua (land marker). When Hotere’s property was about to be demolished for the expansion of the nearby port, she suggested the work be destroyed with it. Hotere was having none of it. The work was carefully removed and now stands in the Hotere Garden Oputae.

Rapira-Davies started working with clay when she studied ceramics at Otago Polytechnic’s art school. She wasn’t interested in making pots; rather she was influenced by Chinese and Indian figurative sculpture, and recalls the impact of seeing the life-size terracotta warriors of Qin She Huang. She also cited the influence of her monumental work Nga Morehu (The Survivors) (completed 1988) of Rodin’s Burghers of Calais and his weighty portrait of Balzac.