Kūmara

Kūmara

This photograph belongs to a series of works depicting Christine Hellyar’s first set of apron sculptures, produced in 1985. Some are composed of simply cut canvas forms upon which were sewn latex casts of food: kūmara, flounder, a raw plucked chicken, these works were conceived by the artist as garments to be worn; others consist only of a bag of salt or flour worn around the waist. To this end, she commissioned Gary Cocker, then a photographic student at the Elam School of Fine Arts, to capture the aprons hung around the necks and waists of live models. Given a wide brief, Cocker employed his then-lover and a pair of friends to pose against the dramatic backdrops of Whatipū beach and the bush that surrounds it, as well as in the more homely surroundings of a garden in Titirangi. The resulting images exceed the bounds of ‘straight’ sculptural documentation—if the conventions of documentation eradicate detail extraneous to the work being captured—instead operating in a heady, ecstatic realm between document, performance and absurd fashion editorial. Cocker’s images transpose a queer sense of glamour onto Hellyar’s works, making explicit the erotic implications and visual punning of Hellyar’s materials and their placement.

Hellyar has written of the apron as a ‘skin’—an interface between the body and the world. The form belongs to the wardrobe of domestic labour—often, still, the realm of women—as well as carrying associations with forms of manual labour, being worn by the likes of carpenters, foundrymen, fishermen, gardeners and blacksmiths. As skin, the apron both protects its wearer from the mess of work, while simultaneously inscribing the residues of an encounter with the world onto the body.

The casting of latex has been a key sculptural strategy for Hellyar since the late-1960s. These sculptures depicted in these photographs represent a return to the process, after the medium became too expensive to sustain in the late 1970s. Within the artist’s broader practice, the works belong within a decades-long inquiry which considers human interactions with, and manipulation of, the environments which surround them, as well as the value judgements and organising logics of human labours, attributes and behaviours—and the human habit of imposing these upon more-than-human forms and occurrences.

These images are key examples of Cocker’s relatively brief career as a photographer. They were produced in the same year as the artist participated in the exhibition Queer Pictures, which was organised by a group of gay and lesbian Elam students to coincide with the second reading of the Homosexual Law Reform Bill. Though they do not directly address this political context, the images operate through a teasing, playful erotics—playing with the already evident questions of fertility, reproduction and the body embedded in Hellyar’s work. Lushly hued, campy and dramatic in their staging, Cocker’s images offer insight into Aotearoa’s queer photographic histories.

— Simon Gennard, 2024