Te Motunui Epa

Description

Author: Rachel Buchanan
Format: Hardback
Publication date: 07/11/2022
Imprint: BRIDGET WILLIAMS BOOKS
ISBN: 9781990046582

‘This is a story about the power of art to help us find a way through the darkness. It is about how art can bring out the best in us, and the worst. The artworks in question are five wooden panels carved in the late 1700s by ancestors in Taranaki.’
This stunning book examines how five interconnected carved panels, Te Motunui Epa, have journeyed across the world and changed practices, understanding and international law on the protection and repatriation of stolen cultural treasures.

The story begins in the early 1800s in Peropero swamp, just north of Waitara. Taranaki was teetering on the edge of what would be almost a century of war, and Te Atiawa hapu moved quickly to dismantle their most important public buildings and hide significant pieces in the swamps. The epa – serpentine figures carved in five totara panels – went to sleep, only to awaken one hundred and fifty years later to hands that would take them to New York, Geneva, London and the Royal Courts of Justice.