Through making ceramics, Tracy Keith (Ngāpuhi) explores a vast realm of connections between people and te taiao (the natural world). In Remember Industry, Keith looks to the whakapapa of natural materials like clay and timber that have shaped human lives, meaning, and livelihoods.
The artist juxtaposes machine-like forms with ancient and hands-on processes. His clay sculptures are formed through rough, direct manipulation and experimentation with clay. Keith uses a modern version of a 500-year-old Japanese raku firing process, where ceramics are heated to extremely high temperatures, removed from the kiln, and placed in combustible materials. This chemical reaction creates unpredictable effects and molten, metallic glazes.
Keith’s art practice processes his own personal history and the wider, ongoing impact of the “urban drift”, a significant historical moment post-World War II, when large groups of Māori moved from their tūrangawaewae to urban centres and townships in the pursuit of paid work. Remember Industry reflects on the artist’s experiences growing up with his grandfather, who worked at the local pulp and paper plant.
The exhibition includes new ceramics, with paintings and drawings, which reflect unknown tīpuna and the adopted generation as consequence of the urban drift. Merging industrial forms with portraiture and figurative sculptures, Keith invokes the history of his own whānau, ruptures in whakapapa, and what Te Rarawa Kohere has described as “a tūrangawaewae of thought”, where iwi and hapū “thought their lives into being in relationship to the land". [1] Working with the elemental and metaphorical qualities of his materials, Keith calls attention to the histories, material conditions, and world around us.
Tracy Keith (Ngāpuhi) lives and works in Heretaunga Hastings, where he is Kaiako - Maunga Kura Toi Rauangi at Toimairangi School of Māori Visual Art, Te Wānanga o Aotearoa. Tracy has exhibited widely within Aotearoa New Zealand at galleries such as The Dowse Art Museum, Pātaka Art + Museum, Bartley & Company Gallery, Wairau Māori Art Gallery, and Tim Melville Gallery.
[1] Moana Jackson, “The Art of Having Faith in Ourselves”, Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art, ed. Nigel Borrell (Penguin, 2022), 2.
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