An encounter with a Brett Graham (Ngāti Koroki Kahukura, Tainui) sculpture is always an event. His recent exhibition Tai Moana, Tai Tangata is currently showing at City Gallery Wellington after its launch at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery earlier this year, the fruition of his 2019 residency. Graham’s practice frequently addresses the architecture and phenomenology of the colonial frontier period by rebooting built or constructed forms, often those associated with the prosecution of the colonial military or spiritual programmes with their counter-insurgent responses within Te Ao Māori.

With Spirit of Aloha Graham conflates that ‘lingua franca’ visual signifier of Polynesia, the Frangipani flower, with the kitset form of the Davy Crockett missile, described in military jargon as ‘a tactical nuclear recoilless smoothbore gun for firing the M388 nuclear projectile armed with the W54 nuclear warhead.’

Graham, whose career achievement was recognised in 2021 with his being named an Arts Laureate, cast Spirit of Aloha from iron in local foundry.

The Davey Crockett missile was tested at the Pohakuloa weapons testing area in Hawai’i between 1962—68. By shrinking the relative scale of the nuclear warhead and enlarging that of the flower, Graham creates a metaphor for the re-assertion of the natural world in the face of the man-made intervention of war-mongering.