Decolonizing Landscapes: Indigenous Belonging in John Walsh’S Paintings
Decolonizing Landscapes, Merkin Decolonizing Landscapes: Indigenous Belonging in John Walsh’s Paintings Sophia Merkin, Columbia University Paintings by contemporary artist John Walsh feature lush and ethereal scenes, often populated by figures both human and mythical. Half Māori (Aitanga a Hauiti) and half Pākehā (of white settler descent), Walsh’s eerie paintings are suffused with a devotion to and kinship with the natural world of Aotearoa, New Zealand and its Indigenous peoples. His paintings lay bare the complicated and partial qualities of landscapes as an artistic genre, providing a counterpoint to centuries of European colonial tableaux. In spite of their pastoral and bucolic traits, landscapes are and have never been neutral; as anthropologist Nicholas Thomas argues, “[in] a settler colonial world, the evocation of an empty land awaiting some sort of meaningful inscription or spiritual definition cannot be seen as a purely pictorial or aesthetic statement.”1 Indeed, Walsh resists the traditional understanding of this genre, as well as the characterization of his paintings as such; in an interview conducted for this paper, he stresses that his paintings are “not pure Landscapes.”2 Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial theory as well as the vexed history of landscapes, I argue that Walsh’s canvases function as decolonizing agents. They destabilize and challenge the legacy of European landscapes and encounters, offering a distinctly critical and Indigenous rearticulation of the genre. 1 Nicholas Thomas, Possessions: Indigenous Art/ Colonial Culture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 22. 2 John Walsh. E-mail interview. Conducted by Sophia Merkin, December 17, 2019. 123 Symposium Proceedings, 2020 Decolonization and Landscapes: a Theoretical Primer In various Pacific contexts, the word decolonization often denotes the historical events and processes that followed independence from European powers.3 Here, I embrace a two-part definition of decolonization, drawn from both Indigenous education scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith and historian Susan A.
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