Textile sculptures by Jo Torr: conversations in cloth
Textiles have always been significant markers in the history of trade and exchange. In the days when travel was the exclusive province of merchants and seamen, cloth was the tactile signifier brought back from distant lands, allowing others to dream and wonder about places they might never visit.
New Zealand artist Jo Torr uses cloth as her primary medium in order to reflect on some of the stories of exchange in our own history, notably those concerning encounters between European and Pacific peoples. As she puts it, her works explore “the types of cultural exchange that have happened, and continue to happen, between Polynesian and non-Polynesian peoples – the way that we change by contact with one another… and the ideas that form our notion of what is ‘Pacific’.”
A selection of works from 2004 to 2021, reveals some of the moments in Torr’s conversations in cloth and the ideas they touch on: early contact between European explorers, Pacific Islanders and Māori (Transit of Venus II& III, Pacific Crossings), the mutual fusion and hybridizing of garment forms and decoration (works from the Ngā Kākāhu suite) and what might be seen as Torr’s personal commitment to living, meaning and being as an artist in Aotearoa New Zealand in Te Hono Wai: Where Waters Meet.
Image: Figure 1. Mark Tantrum Jo Torr Transit of Venus dress 2004. Image above: Figure 3. Jo Torr Transit of Venus III detail.
Transit of Venus II (Figure 1 photograph Michael Hall, from Tupaia’s Paintbox at City Gallery, Wellington 2005) and Pacific Crossings (Figure 2 photograph Michael Hall) belong to an exhibition named for the Tahitian prince Tupaia, who facilitated dialogue between Europeans and Pacific Islanders during Captain Cook’s first voyages in the Pacific (1769-70). It was Tupaia’s skills as navigator, mapmaker and translator that made trade and mutual discovery both possible, and relatively peacable. Study of historic pattern books and paintings helped Torr shape the distinctly 18th century silhouettes of Venus and Pacific into sculptures that echo the dress-styles of the visitors: on the one hand, loose-fitting sleeves trimmed from elbow to wrist, full skirts supported by panniers, a petticoat that falls from a centre front dip of the waist and a modest décolletage; on the other, a standup collared frockcoat with deep cuffs and slim lines, that opens in a gentle curve on an embroidered waistcoat with a cut-away centre front. 
Figure 2. Image courtesy of Michael Hall.
The conversation opens through the medium of fabric and its embellishment – the garments being made not from the bright silks designed to catch candlelight at London balls and soirées but from Tahitian tapa cloth, dyed in natural pigments sourced from clay and plants. Rather than European silver thread and paillettes, Torr has embellished her Venus bodice with tiny cowrie shells, embedded in threadwork of coconut fibre sinnet. (Figure 3 Transit of Venus (detail)) The man’s coat and waistcoat she has embroidered with New Zealand Kowhai foliage, inspired by the early botanical paintings of Sydney Parkinson who accompanied Cook on his first Pacific voyage.
The rich frame of reference and documentation informing all her works has made them highly sought after as museum pieces. Of the two referred to here, Transit of Venus II belongs to the Auckland Museum collection (the artist holds Transit of Venus III), while Pacific Crossings belongs to the Canterbury Museum. The fit and finishing in each case, however, hold a clue to their status as artworks rather than period pieces. While period pieces have usually been worn by specific individuals, or are replicas closely modeled on such garments, and finished, as far as is possible, with equivalent materials. Torr’s garments have been made to fit 21st century body shapes, and finished with 20th and 21st century materials. The embroidery on Pacific Crossings, for example, has been created with rayon thread, while the buttons are sixpenny pieces mounted on a plastic shank. The historical documentation that informs them acts primarily as a springboard for a creative riff on possibilities. Rather than being associated with any one character in history, therefore, her garments are ‘characters’ in their own right.
Figure 4. Ngā Kākahu Ngore.
The suite of works in Ngā Kākāhu, kākāhu being the Māori term for ‘cloak’, show the artist extending the terms of cultural exchange, with a greater degree of mixage between Māori and European dress codes evident in the style as well as the fabric of the garments. (First exhibited in Tauranga Art Gallery, 2009-2010.)
Research for the exhibition included study of the photography of the Burton Brothers, whose studio operated from 1866-1898 and who produced a series of photographs in 1885 called The Māori at Home. They included ‘Taumaranui – King Country’ and ‘At Whare Komiti, Heretaunga, King Country’: photos that show Māori wearing restyled elements of European skirts, jackets and bowlers, and the textiles, particularly woolen blankets, they wore as cloaks. While there is some record of Europeans wearing Māori cloaks, and greenstone ornaments, there is not the same level of adaptation of the other’s culture. Torr’s sculptures thus imagine a closer dialogue between Māori and Pākehā dress codes than the ones recorded by history. Their interleaving of styles and materials – hints of Māori cloak patterns underpinning European bustles, flax tassels alongside the cotton pleats and pompoms of the Victorian era – make for a rich and complex hybridity (Figures 4, 5 & 6 Photography Michael Hall).
Figure 6. Ngā Kākahu Kaitaka.
The exquisite hand-finish and bespoke seams of these garments suggest haute couture, and it comes as no surprise that Torr has often been asked to made garments to measure. But couture at the service of consumerism, like dress as period costume, are not things she is interested in. Her sculptures, like vestimentary poems, are designed to set us thinking – and dreaming – not just about history, but also about another time and place conceived by the artist. The Pacific, perhaps. Not as it was, or even as we now know it, but as we would like it to be.
For in the final suite of works chosen to introduce Jo Torr’s textile art to a new audience, we find pieces that speak implicitly of an ideal Pacific community in which we all speak each other’s language. Te Hono Wai : Where Waters Meet (Aratoi Wairarapa Museum and Gallery, Masterton, 2021), re-traces a ‘sampler’ of what our shared history could have been, could still become, if true cultural exchange overcomes the divisions that arise when one culture dominates another.
Figure 7. Image courtesy of Lucia Zanmonti Te Hono Wai - Two red gowns.
The actual ‘sampler’, that was inspirational in this regard, featured in research by Vivien Caughley, a collaborator with Torr and Māori/Irish artist Maureen Lander, on an exhibition for Te Kōhunga Museum of Waitangi in 2016. The sample was a ‘piece of print’ given to a young Māori girl named Ehura in 1815. 10 year-old Ehura had been taken by her grandmother to live with Hannah King, an accomplished needlewoman. Her grandmother wished her granddaughter to learn “to do everything like white people” – including sewing. Torr re-imagines the two gowns Ehura was invited to make at the time from the “piece of print”, while reversing, or mirroring, the cultural learning process they represented. E Rua Ngā Kākahu Whero: Two Red Gowns comprises an Empire-line gown made of hand-stitched red linen, in imitation of the European-style gown Ehura was taught to make, and a second garment Torr made from exclusively traditional materials, dyed in the traditional manner, and constructed using traditional weaving techniques Ehura would have learned from her own whānau (family). (Figure 7 Photography Lucia Zanmonti].
This second garment, the one Torr hypothesises Ehura might have made using her known skills, was constructed by the artist after an intensive learning process, as each strand of flax had to be processed and pieced together according to another culture’s vocabulary and syntax of garment-making. The muka was first scraped and refined with mussel shell, and the extracted fibre, as Torr describes the process, was “plied along the thigh into whenu (warp threads) and aho (weft threads)”. (Figure 8 Jo Torr working the fibre with mussle shell. Photograph Te Weu Jobe) It was then woven by hand in a technique known as “whatu aho rua (double pair twining)” and dyed with tānekaha, a natural dye from the bark of a New Zealand native tree. Multiple technical texts were consulted during the process. And so, as one who commits to learning another language, Torr painstakingly submitted to an apprenticeship in another culture’s textiles as did Ehura in 1815.
Image: Jo Torr.
In Torr’s art, then, we begin and end with textiles – from tapa, to woollen cloaks and woven muka – all made into works that are inflected with several different accents. In this manner, Jo Torr opens our eyes to the diverse stories and colours within our own world, just as silks, cottons and muslins once spoke of other lands when they were brought home by the seafarers and traders of the past.
Text by Keren Chiaroni
images courtesy of Michael Hall