Tū Ake: Reclaiming the Mantelpiece

For generations, these figurines stood silent on mantelpieces across Aotearoa, symbols of respectability, civilisation, and a particular kind of domesticity that had nothing to do with us. Porcelain ladies and gentlemen, mass-produced in European factories, found their way into our whare, gifted and displayed as markers of aspiration within a colonial framework that told us who we should become.

But whose identity was really being displayed? Whose values were we meant to aspire to?

The mantelpiece was always contested space. It held objects that signified whose aesthetics mattered, whose civilisation was valued, whose identity was deemed worthy of display. By recoating these figurines, I’m asking: What happens when we take control of that space? What happens when the objects of colonial domesticity become vessels for indigenous assertion?

This work transforms these figurines through an act of indigenous agency, paired by colour, now standing upon the very flag that declares our sovereignty and self-determination. The transformation speaks to a fundamental truth: our whakapapa, our ancestral origins, determine our form, the foundation of who we are is given, inherited, carried forward through generations. But our identity assertions determine our agency. We are not passive recipients of history; we are active agents who choose how we stand, how we speak, how we make ourselves visible in the world.

The spray paint doesn’t erase what lies beneath, the colonial form remains visible in outline and gesture, but what we see, what demands our attention now, is rangatiratanga. Just as our whakapapa runs beneath everything we do, connecting us to tūpuna and to whenua, so too does the porcelain remain. But what we assert, what we coat ourselves in, what we choose to display, that is our agency.

This is not nostalgia. This is not about returning to some imagined pure past. This is about now, about our capacity to honour whakapapa while transforming, reimagining, and determining for ourselves how we appear. The porcelain underneath reminds us that history is layered, that our whakapapa includes complex encounters with colonisation. But the colours that coat them declare; we choose what is visible. We choose what is valued. We choose how our identity is displayed.

Tū ake. Stand up. Rise. These figures, once symbols of colonial domesticity, now stand in defiant assertion of who we are and who we have always been: tangata whenua, grounded in whakapapa, exercising rangatiratanga.

This is the power of transformation.

This is tino rangatiratanga made visible.