‘Te Haumeika’ is a transliteration of ‘The Homemaker’ into te reo Māori. The sculpture is a scaled version of ‘Wakefield Dreaming’, which was installed on Waiheke Island as part of Sculpture on the Gulf 2024. This new iteration is exhibited at the Aotearoa Art Fair, situated on the waterfront at the Viaduct Events Centre—offering a layered resonance between land, sea, and the colonial mechanisms of arrival.
Together, the works interrogate the legacy of Edward Gibbon Wakefield—often celebrated as the architect of systematic colonisation in Aotearoa.
Wakefield's 1849 treatise The Art of Colonization, written during his imprisonment in London’s Newgate Prison, outlined a scheme that relied on acquiring land from Māori at minimal cost in order to settle British emigrants. His theory proposed delaying land ownership to ensure a compliant, landless labour force to generate wealth for Britain. Māori were effectively excluded from this colonial vision—their presence virtually unacknowledged in his writings.
This erasure had devastating and lasting consequences. Wakefield’s project of dispossession underpinned systems that continue to produce inequity for Māori, reflected in statistics such as disproportionately high incarceration rates. These experiences echo those of other Indigenous peoples across the Pacific, including Aboriginal Australians and Native Hawaiians.
By referencing the prison watchtower form—particularly those of Paremoremo Prison, where Māori comprise a significant portion of the inmate population—Te Haumeika and Wakefield Dreaming reframe Wakefield’s colonial ‘dream’ as a carceral reality. Installed in the context of Waiheke, Graham inverts the gaze: it is now the privileged who are subject to observation. The ‘homemaker’ thus becomes a figure both of control and critique, prompting reflection on who truly gets to call this land home.