The Right Thing To Do
Russ Flatt won the 2020 Wallace Arts Trust Paramount Award with his work Kōruru (knucklebones). In his practice he constructs vignettes, and photographs them, each project forming the basis for a series of images; his swimming-pool studies appeared in Art New Zealand 149. Ron Brownson met with Flatt and their conversation began with a discussion about his award-winning image.
Ron Brownson: Kōruru (knucklebones) was awarded last year’s Wallace Award. How did that image come about?
Russ Flatt: During last year’s Covid-19 lockdown I spent lots of time with my whānau. I kept thinking about my mother, who passed in 2008. My mother grew up in Wairoa, rural Hawke’s Bay, with her ten sisters. The family had little money, but they whāngaied (a customary practice where a child is brought up by someone other than their birth parents) a fair-skinned boy with red hair, who became my Uncle Mickey. My mother herself had been whāngai-ed to her grandma (my great-grandmother) who lived two doors away.
I wish Mum had met my son Jules. My husband Alistair and I whāngai-ed Jules. I now realise that the whāngai tradition runs right through my whole whakapapa.
Before I made the photograph, I thought about the things which my mother and I used to do together. Mum and I would play kōruru (knucklebones). This image is like a love-letter to her. It reimagines my mum as well as my Uncle Mickey playing the game I remember from my childhood.
R.B.: Early in 2020, you were commissioned to create new landscape photographs for an Auckland hotel. You undertook a project unlike any that you have done before, both in subject and scale.
R.F.: Peter Cooper owns both
