Weaver, installation artist, mentor and Arts Laureate

Maureen Lander (Te Hikutu/Ngāpuhi, Te Roroa) MNZM, an active multi-media installation artist who has exhibited locally, nationally and internationally since 1986, has been recognised as an Arts Foundation Laureate. This is in the wake of being named as one of the distinguished alumni of Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland in 2022.

In 2002 Lander was the first person of Māori descent to gain a Doctorate in Fine Arts from the Elam School of Fine Arts.

For four decades she has helped to blaze a trail for Māori artists, and significantly contributed to the recognition of weaving in a contemporary art context.

Over several months in 2021-22, Maureen was back on campus to create a commissioned artwork for the new atrium of the Engineering School titled Pou Iho, made in collaboration with eight students from Engineering, Architecture and Fine Arts and commissioned by the University Art Collection.

“The University was a big part of my life from my early 40s as a student until I retired from academia at 65,” she recently told Ingenio magazine. “It still plays a role in my life.”
 

Lander’s artwork draws inspiration from woven fibre taonga in museum collections as well as from contemporary installation art. She first began learning cloak-making skills from noted Māori weaver Diggeress Te Kanawa, and spent many years researching fibre arts.

Since her retirement from university teaching, Maureen has continued to make and exhibit her own creative work, mainly in the form of large fibre installations such as Flatpack Whakapapa which opened at the Dowse Museum in 2017, in which she explored the connections between whakapapa and raranga (Māori weaving) by using an everyday motif like the flat-pack design.

As an artist, Maureen is committed to innovation in a way that is deeply collaborative. In 2020 she worked with the Mata Aho Collective on a large installation titled Atapō for the Auckland Art Gallery’s major exhibition of Maori art, Toi Tu Toi Ora, which later won the prestigious Walter’s Prize.

Lander received a Te Waka Toi Kingi Ihaka award in 2019, and in 2020 became a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to Māori art. And now, adding to her long list of achievements, she has been recognised in the 2022 Arts Foundation receiving the Theresa Gattung Female Arts Practitioners Award.

“Becoming an Arts Foundation Laureate is like being welcomed into an extended whānau of special people, some of whom I am already familiar with or know well and others who I’ve never met,” she says. “It’s a great honour, and a nice feeling of belonging.”