Join Te Papa painting conservator Hae Min Park for a unique look at the process involved in artwork restoration. Hae Min will take us through her process, sharing her work on Emily Karaka’s Ka Awatea, currently hanging in Te Papa’s level 4 stairwell.
Ka Awatea is the largest of eight works by Māori political artist Emily Karaka represented in Te Papa’s collection. The painting was created in response to the 1991 Ka Awatea policy, which sought to implement the
principles of the Treaty of Waitangi and travelled through five US cities in the early 1990s.
Across two 2.5-metre-wide panels, there are nineteen distinct types of man-made and organic collaged elements, each at varying levels of deterioration and some with biosecurity concerns that preclude the work from international loans.
In lieu of the constraints but recognizing the artist’s first major exhibition of her oeuvre at the Sharjah Art Foundation, Emily Karaka: Ka Awatea, A New Dawn (7 September – 1 December 2024), Ka Awatea went through an extensive conservation process by Te Papa paintings conservators and is displayed for the first time in eighteen years.
Join us as Hae Min shares the unique details related to the materials and construction of the panels, the condition issues, the decision-making process involving the rationales for different levels of interventions, and the treatment undertaken in preparation for display. The presentation will be followed by a close look at the work on display.
Hae Min Park joined the Te Papa Collection Care team as the Kaitiaki Taonga Conservator Paintings in June 2023. Hae Min completed her training at the Conservation Center of the Institute of the Fine Arts, New York University in 2018, and is particularly passionate about technical art history.
Above image credit: Ka Awatea; Emily Karaka; Te Papa Collection 1997-0012-1_AT. Photographed by Melissa Irving, Collections Photographer, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Right: Before and after treatment; Hae Min Park.