By Garance Nyssen
On 14 July 2019, in the port district of the Gabut in La Rochelle, south-western France, George Nuku was hurrying to finish a large whale made from transparent green, blue and red bottoms of plastic bottles[1]. Children had been making jellyfish all afternoon with the help of Nuku and Mathilde, his spouse, from other plastic bottles. They decorated the pergola under which Nuku made his whale with the help of one of his friends; my help as well as that of Belgian tourists attracted by the bubbling atmosphere and intrigued by this sculpture made only from plastic bottles. Nuku’s open workshop on that sunny day in the Franc’Ocean village resulted in the creation of a big plastic whale which has now entered the collection of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle de La Rochelle.
George Nuku is a Māori artist and carver of the iwi (tribes) Ngāti Kahungunu and Tūwharetoa as well as Scottish and German descent, born in 1964 in the Hawkes Bay region Aotearoa-New Zealand. He is regarded as one of Aotearoa – New Zealand’s current leading contemporary Māori artists.
After working, teaching and exhibiting his works in his homeland, he has travelled and continued to exhibit in the United States and Europe, including France where he currently lives. Having earlier worked with natural found materials such as stone, bone, wood and shell, Nuku’s work is characterized by the use of plexiglass and polystyrene which he uses to create sculptures and installations which are very often created alongside Māori or Polynesian collections held in museums. Through this practice, Nuku not only showcases these objects but, most importantly, he revives their mauri, their living force.
Nuku’s ongoing Bottled Ocean project, which he initiated in 2014, is not based on museum collections – at least, at first – but on his personal vision of the pollution in oceans caused by plastic waste. The first time he presented Bottled Ocean – under the title Bottled Ocean 2114 – was for the Pulima Art Awards at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei, Taïwan. The project then travelled to France, Belgium, Aotearoa New-Zealand, New-Caledonia, Taïwan again, Indonesia, the Netherlands and Switzerland[2]. Nuku really considers Bottled Ocean as a “project” because each manifestation is different from the previous installation and his ideas evolve with time[3]. The project consists of conducting workshops involving the public in order to create sculptures or sculptural installations of varying sizes in various places such as contemporary art museums, natural history museums, ethnographic museums or in the premises of Smédar, a French public agency which recycles the wastes of the city of Rouen, where Nuku lives.
Even though there are variations with each version of the Bottled Ocean installation, they are often designed on the same core basis. Nuku creates a futuristic world set in one hundred years as reflected in the exhibitions’ titles: Bottled Ocean 2114, Bottled Ocean 2115, etc. In these worlds, everything has been transformed into plastic, including animals from the marine realm like sharks, rays, whales, frigate birds, etc. Nuku creates these sculptured animals out of plastic carboys, plastic bottles and plexiglass, which he sculpts and engraves with Māori designs. This whole marine world hangs around a wakapounamu, a canoe, or a tall sculpture of Tangaroa in mutation, the Māori and Polynesian atua (god) of the sea and fish. Both the wakapounamu and Tangaroa are also made of plastic bottles and plexiglass. With Bottled Ocean, Nuku’s goal is to introduce the public to building a new relationship with plastic. In his practice, he has always said that he sees plastic as part of the whakapapa, Māori genealogy and cosmology (Skinner and Bolton 2012:480). With this project, Nuku wants for every human to include it in their own cosmology.
For Nuku, plastic and pounamu, the prized New-Zealand greenstone, are quite alike in that they are both resistant, transparent or translucent, beautiful, durable, sparkling and luminous. Furthermore, pounamu comes from the womb of Papatūānuku, Mother Earth, and is found in the riverbeds of Te Wai Pounamu in Aotearoa New-Zealand’s South Island. In turn, in the form of a bottle, plastic can hold water which, combined with light, are sources of life. Finally, Nuku considers that plastic also comes from the womb of Papatūānuku because it is made from oil (Nuku and al. 2016:53). All these similarities between the origins and qualities of plastic and pounamu lead Nuku to elevate the former to the status of the latter. For him, plastic is a taonga, something culturally and socially prized. Taonga are part of the whakapapa, genealogy, and thus connect the past to the present, ancestors to the living (Tapsell 2011:24). However, the public is not always easily convinced that plastic should be considered a precious and sacred material and, ultimately, as one of our ancestors.
Public involvement is one of the particularities of Bottled Ocean and, for Nuku, a way to influence and encourage people to adopt his point of view on plastic. During the preparation of Bottled Ocean-Te Ao Maori in the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle de La Rochelle, one of Nuku’s requests to the museum’s director was to organize workshops with children in order to help him with the installation. In the end, the entire museum staff were involved and even stayed on into the evenings to help[4]. The public was involved through both participation in scheduled workshops and/or by spontaneously helping Nuku, whether it was by giving him empty plastic bottles or by joining in the creation of the installation. Nuku calls these people his “slaves of love”, meaning that they are attracted to what he is creating and to his project. However, this active involvement of the public is not enough for people to adopt Nuku’s point of view. Nuku argues that it is mainly through the action of doing that they can embrace it and, in a way, transmute plastic into pounamu.
By establishing equivalencies between the different qualities or, as Nuku puts it, “shades” of plastic and pounamu, he becomes what Tim Ingold describes as an alchemist, someone who treats a material not by what it is made of but rather what it can do (Ingold 2013:29). His relationship to plastic is deeply intimate: he states that “he speaks Perspex fluently” (Jacobs 2009:117) and that he has even become plastic because he has been sculpting it for so long and even inhales -unintentionally- particles of it in the sculpting process[5]. Moreover, he does not describe this sculpting process in a technical way but really allows room for the material itself and the construction of their relationship. When people come to work with Nuku, he does not give them detailed instruction to follow; rather, they have to observe and imitate to understand what their role is. The audience follows Nuku’s gestures and in this way they also follow the plastic materials. Finally, the way Nuku names plastic is very effective for its transmutation. Indeed, he often does not use the term “plastic” but he uses the term “plastic-pounamu” instead or even just “pounamu”. This semantic adjustment, even if not adopted by the public participants, is another way to invert our perception of plastic.
Nuku’s past exhibition in La Rochelle, Bottled Ocean-Te Ao Maori (October 2016 – January 2017), is a good example for understanding his Bottled Ocean project and, at the same time, evokes other aspects of Nuku’s broader work. This version mixed the main principles of Bottled Ocean with an additional part explaining the Māori way of conceiving the world (Te Ao Māori). This latter aspect was created at the museum’s request and based on its ethnographic and natural history collections. The museum holds twenty-four Māori objects, twenty-one vertebrate species and approximately one hundred invertebrate species collected in Aotearoa – New Zealand (Nuku and al. 2016:27). The Te Ao Māori section of the exhibit was located at the back of the room with the collections of Māori and New Zealand objects and specimens displayed behind a large showcase. In order to revive the mauri (living force) of these collections and to imagine their use in their original context or environment, Nuku created plexiglass display devices. Thus, the korowai pihepihe (cloak) was worn by a female Māori chief figure sculpted in plexiglass.
The Bottled Ocean installation occupied the rest of the room, with the wakapounamu in the centre and marine animals around it. Nuku and children from nearby schools painted plastic particles on the walls because, for Nuku, they are the new children of Tangaroa, atua (god) of water and fish, like the mutant animals. A Pseudorca skull (kākahi or pāpahu)[6] from the museum’s collection was installed in the wakapounamu and surrounded by plastic bottles to keep him warm and give him a burial. This skull was found in 1969 on Mahia beach (Te Ika-a-Maui, Northern Island), an important place for Nuku because it is linked to the history of one of his ancestors, Ruawharo. As can be seen with this example, the whole exhibition was also conceived as a funeral procession – a way for Nuku to symbolically repatriate these taonga to Aotearoa – New Zealand. This way of presenting the collections is interesting because it breaks the usual codes of separating ethnographic, natural history and contemporary collections. It gives the visitor a glimpse into the Māori worldview, where nature and culture are not separate, where the past strongly influences the present and the future and which can, perhaps, help us cope better with the invasion of plastic.
Lastly, the question of time is very present in the Bottled Ocean project. In the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle de La Rochelle, the museum’s collections refer to the past but, with Nuku’s intervention, they are thrown in the present. Plastic materials and especially plastic bottles also summon the present and allow visitors to become aware of their own plastic consumption. From Nuku’s perspective, plastic refers to the past since he considers it as a taonga and the future is also heavily represented by the Bottled Ocean world created by Nuku.
These installations borrow from the concepts of the time capsule and message in a bottle. A time capsule is based on a play of temporality: it summons the past into the future. However, in Bottled Ocean, it is the future that is summoned into the present. Exhibition rooms are the equivalent of the time capsule’s container. As with this device, Nuku chooses to show us a glimpse of a (future) world that we can recompose from these snippets. Finally, a time capsule is often created when someone is pessimistic about their future, but also optimistic enough to believe that someone will find it. Thus, Bottled Ocean can also be seen as a message in a bottle, sent from a beach far away, geographically and temporally. It is a call from Nuku to change our perception of plastic.
Each Bottled Ocean exhibition is a physical, material and temporal experience. While visiting them allows us to understand Nuku’s perception of plastic and perhaps change our own, it is probably even more effective when we can participate in their creation. In doing so, we can better understand Nuku’s relation to plastic and transmute it into pounamu with him. Bottled Ocean is thus a way of enchanting what is detestable to us (Monsaingeon 2017:252) but, above all, a way of giving it meaning in our world.
I am grateful to George Nuku for our exchanges and for his trust and I thank the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle de La Rochelle for permission to use these photographs.
Garance Nyssen completed her Masters Dissertation on George Nuku’s Bottled Ocean project at the Ecole du Louvre in 2020 and is currently undertaking another Masters Dissertation in anthropology at the Paris Nanterre University.
Bibliography
Ingold, Tim. 2013, Making: anthropology, archeology, art and architecture, London; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Monsaingeon, Baptiste. 2017, Homo Detritus, Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Nuku, George, and al. 2016. Bottled Ocean 2116. Te Ao Maori, La Rochelle: Imprimaire VLR.
Nuku, George, and Jacobs, Karen. 2009, “An Artist’s Perspective, 3. George Nuku in conversation with Karen Jacobs”, Journal of Museum ethnography, no.21 pp.145-151.
Skinner, Damian, and Bolton, Lissant. 2012, “Continuity and change in customary arts”, in Peter, Brunt, Nicholas Thomas, Sean Mallon, Lissant Bolton, Deidre Brown, Damian Skinner and Susanne Küchler. 2012, Art in Oceania: A New History, London: Thames & Hudson: 467- 497.
Tapsell, Paul. 2011, The Art of Taonga, Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington.
06 2017-01-18, Interview of George Nuku by Elise Patole-Edoumba, video, Mathieu Vouzelaud, La Rochelle: Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, 2017.
07 2017-01-21, Opening of the exhibition, video, Mathieu Vouzelaud, La Rochelle: Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, 2017.
[1] A part of La Gabut was then occupied by the Franc’Océan village created for the Francofolies, the annual music festival held in La Rochelle. [2] Bouteille à la mer 2120 – Te Ao Maori is on exhibition in the Muséum d’histoire naturelle in Geneva, Switzerland, until 22 January 2022. [3] George Nuku, personal communication, 17 January 2020. [4] Elise Patole-Edoumba, personal communication, February 6, 2020. [5] 06 2017-01-18, Interview of George Nuku by Elise Patole-Edoumba; 07 2017-01-21, Opening of the exhibition, videos, Mathieu Vouzelaud, Natural History Museum, La Rochelle, 2017. [6] Pseudorcas are cetaceans from the Delphinidae family.