Doorway to Night: Brett Graham

Takoto ana mai te marama i te pae
Te tara ki te uruhi
He ripa tauārai ki te iwi
Kua ngaro
Ki te pō uriuri
Ki te pō tangotango
Ki te  pō i oti atu
I te tatau o te pō….

Moonlight lies across the threshold :
A sharp yet subtle line : a barrier to those
Who are lost
To darkest night
To deepest night
To ultimate night
Through the doorway
To night……

Doorway to Night frames the darkness of bereavement, the finality of death; the loss of someone meaningful; a parent, a mentor, a lover, a friend; it articulates the experience of suspension, of accepting transition; of reconciling strength and weakness, conception and dissolution, lamentation and joy. From within the sanctuary of the Whare Mate, the actual and allegorical House of Mourning, those left behind may hold, then deflect the impact of loss. They question their own presence and absence, as this healing process moves through the turning of the seasons. Brett Graham, in this majestic memento mori, has erected this Whare Mate to honour the passing of his parents Fred and Norma who, in the year before, followed his mentor Selwyn Murupaenga into te pō i oti atu, the ultimate night. They all moved through that final doorway; moe mārire mai koutou.

Stories resonate, chanting this name: Pōtatau, the invincible warrior chief named for his killing prowess. Any battlefield encounter with him was inevitably lethal, conflated by his metonym, Te Wherowhero, someone drenched in deep red blood. He personified Doorway to Night. Pōtatau.

As high Ariki or esteemed leader of the Waikato people, Pōtatau Te Wherowhero revealed a canny sense of strategy and entrepreneurial awareness in rapidly changing times. His realm included the lush fertile lands along the river, and the critical portage routes of Tāmaki-makau-rau. He flourished in both worlds, colonial and tribal; he befriended and worked with influential foreign incomers, including Governor Grey, and he cultivated potential opportunities for his people. He understood that to control land and river access would ensure their prosperity, mobility and trade in the nineteenth century, so he actively asserted critical authority over this territory. By 1840, he maintained homes throughout the region, notably at the ancient Pukekawa pa site in the Auckland Domain, and also in the new trading settlement of Onehunga. Overlooking the Manukau Harbour, Pōtatau built a large comfortable whare puni in raupō (Typha augustifolia) bulrush leaves, featuring a generous tomokanga entrance which dominated a sunny sidewall. This waterfront dwelling was acquired by the Forbes family and became the popular New Leith Inn. It stood near the current site of the Gow Langsford Gallery, this building; thus, in this installation, Graham reimagines a confluence of mana, histories, whakapapa, and contemporary meaning.

Unlike whare whakairo, carved ancestral houses which are now familiar to most people in modern Aotearoa, the whare puni were constructed from soft fibre materials – the pliable but hardy leaves and stems of raupō, spongey logs of ponga (Cyathea dealbata) and mamaku (Cyathea medullaris), or malleable stacked mānuka (Leptospernum). Easily built from such light, manageable and immediately abundant materials, they were usually regarded as temporary, though many did last a few decades. Most, and particularly whare mate, or houses of mourning, fell gracefully back into the whenua, the earth, as life flowed on.

Acknowledging this primal connection, Graham has adopted a novel medium to honour his recent dead. For this unique memento mori, he has turned from the recurrent monumental, enduring media of stone, wood and metal, and chosen instead to explore the resilient yet yielding resource of plant fibre.

Tī kōuka (Cordyline australis), known as the New Zealand cabbage tree and common throughout the country, defines his architecture of remembering. From the days of Pōtatau, tī kōuka served as sentinels around urupa and wāhi tapu, protecting burial grounds and forbidden sites. Some rare trees of venerable age became secret repositories for the bones of significant war leaders; or in times of war were ornamented with the grisly trophies of battle. Such intimate association with death imbues tī kōuka with even more spiritual power, offering a clear pathway to the pō tangotango, the darkest night. Across this land, for every iwi, the plant symbolises resilience, regeneration and the persistence of memory.

To fashion the whare, rau tī kōuka, supple blades of pale green, were collected, stripped, measured and sorted into piles. Plaited firmly together, one horizontal line over another, row upon neat row, they formed the three outfacing walls, firm beneath a layered roof of wider, tougher leaves. Each wall became a supple black cloak of quivering darkness. And throughout the shadowy interior drifted the lingering scent of tī kōuka, for the calm of the House of Mourning enhances sensory perception. By inhaling this pervasive fragrance, people remember more clearly, embraced by the physicality of leaves braided together, adorning walls, ensuring stability and shelter.

Curiously, there is one visual incongruity. On a conventional build, horizontal kaho battens, aka aka vines or heavy taura cordage secure the layers of fresh braided fibre that would be exposed to the elements. Clipped or bound into place, they resist turbulent weather, heavy rain, harsh sun, high winds, and human incursion; but Doorway to Night denies that practice. Within the Whare Mate a question rises; why disrupt the elegant flow and fall of lush tī kōuka leaves with neat lines of containment; why not challenge the threat of death by adhering to a visual aesthetic that sustains the rhythm, the surge, the mauri of the building’s corporeal beauty? Take the risk. Turn away from the safety of kaho or taura. Deny the elements. Cross the threshold; walk through Doorway to Night.

Invoking the design of Pōtatau’s whare puni, the Tomokanga or Entranceway extends a sturdy welcome into a stark and simple interior. Two upright amo panels on either side support the sweeping horizontal pare.  Wrought with twisted wormwood, ridged rough and denticulated, the timber presents a dramatic textural counterpoint to the overall whare construction of rippling tī kōuka. Graham harvested the door panels from treefall in his mother Norma’s lustrous and memorable garden, which she cultivated with such joy and riotous colour. He marked the timber’s surface, scouring with haehae, the uneven slashes inflicted on one’s own living skin, bleeding out acute grief. Runnels of iroiro, genesis of the carver’s art, cut and gouge in seemingly random sigils; as they are worming inward, as living iroiro who seek and consume dead flesh, shrouded in the rich tumescence of fibre that holds and constructs the house itself.

Braided tī kōuka is both structural and symbolic, as its falling strands cascade in wavy surfaces and purling enclosures, transforming organic matter into architecture, while the trees stand as quiet sentinels within the gallery. They define thresholds, hold absence, and reinforce the exhibition’s meditation on succession and authority. The visitor is urged to enter; to cross the barrier, to pass through Doorway to Night, to experience its subtle, scented power.

With reference again to the Whare Mate, this project sustains a buoyant ongoing intergenerational dialogue. Graham’s late father, Fred Graham, created powerful and significant works; he probed the origins of Pōtatau’s name and contemplated, in diverse visual form, the mana of the Kīngitanga movement.  Fluent in ancestral practice and arcane theory, he eloquently extended sculptural language into the realm of political and cultural memory; and his son continues this necessary kōrero. Accordingly, Doorway to Night acknowledges lineage not only through content but through practice itself — a conversation carried across generations, a tidal flow of words, images and ideas, a resonance of whakapapa.

Ina rā e kōrero nei : te mana, te wehi, te tapu o rātou kua wehe;
As memento mori, this house speaks, words resonate across the waters of Manukau; and the rau tī kōuka tremble and stretch, remembering ……
Tū mai rā, Pōtatau, tū mai rā.

Ngahuia te Awekotuku
Te Kuirau, Rotorua
Paengawhawha 2026