Mat Tait is a fulltime artist and an award-winning author, a fluent speaker and teacher of te reo Māori and a long-time Mārahau resident. For the sake of full disclosure, I wanted to start by admitting that I'm a big fan of Mat Tait’s art and the man himself. There is something in Mat’s art that hits me right in the chest.
I am the proud owner of a number of his original artworks and have simply badgered the hell out of him over many years until he has agreed to design and draw images for my office, my band and even my skin. After my most recent purchase of his drawings we joked that I may now have to add a Mat Tait Wing to our house to display the collection. I love how Mat’s art can often convey a quintessential New Zealand-ness and particularly our pre and post colonial times as I imagine they were.
Mat has also designed just about every brochure and other piece of marketing collateral and merchandise for our businesses for the past 20-odd years and is even the design editor of this very magazine. I can only imagine how odd he might be feeling as he is laying out a feature about himself. The truth of it is that the only way I could get him to agree to the interview and feature was by letting him know that my mother, who can be somewhat terrifying when she choses, had insisted the story be included in this magazine. She said something along the lines of “You tell that Mat Tait he’s going to be featured in the magazine or I’ll have his guts for garters.”
I sat down for a chat with Mat in late July and despite having known him for a good few years and having worked with him on countless projects, I learnt many new things about him and his work.
Mat was born in Ōtautahi Christchurch where he lived until he was around 11 years old, then moved to Hamilton for around three years before shifting again, this time to Napier where he started at Colenso College part way through his second year at high school. Mat’s Dad is a well-known and highly regarded educator and administrator, so the moves were necessitated by him taking up new positions at different schools.
The shifting between schools was tough, says Mat: “I never found moving schools a particularly enjoyable experience”. To complicate matters further, Colenso was what could be uncharitably referred to as a ‘tough school’ in 1984 and at 14 years old, it would be a difficult phase of life to fit in at a new school, particularly when your dad is the deputy principal. Mat reckons he managed to keep that last fact on the downlow but does recall some dicey moments. “Well, it was a big school so my friends knew, but yeah, it wasn’t widely known. Luckily, Dad was really well liked. So, thank goodness for that. There were a couple of incidents where I thought I might be about to get a pummeling here. But it actually turned out that the person who I thought was stalking across the quad to pummel me, was actually coming across to say that they thought Dad was alright.”
Mat studied art throughout high school and at some point, decided that is what he wanted to pursue as his career. “I’m not sure exactly when, but I was like: OK, I’m going to be an artist, and not just any old artist. I was going to be a capital-A fine artist. A painter or whatever. And so my goal was to get into art school.”
Mat says his acceptance to study for a four-year Bachelor of Fine Arts at Ilam, part of Canterbury University, was due to his “slightly better than average marks”. “I only squeaked in because of people dropping out. So yeah, I think I was quite lucky to make it in.” However, once he was at university he found the entire approach challenging, “I don’t know how things are done now, but back then it was absolutely ruthless. They made this very up-front, that you’re not here to muck around. At the end of the year, we’re cutting probably about half of you. So, the pressure was on kind of immediately,” he remembers.
However, Mat did make it through the first year and when it came to choosing his studio or specialisation, he went for painting, the most competitive of the studios. “There was an element of competition, even though you’d made it through, there was competition to get into the studio that you wanted to get into. Painting was the most desirable one, so it’s the toughest one to get into. Anyway, I got good marks that first year so I was able to get into painting, which was great. But I was also ready to quit. The teaching method was sort of bootcamp style. Like, break you down to build you up. And I mean break you down, like emotionally at times. It was absolutely brutal,” says Mat.
Throughout this process however, Mat did develop his craft and find his own style. Although he felt the tutors favoured “fairly cool abstractions” they were also looking for “consistency” and students who “were developing it in a clear and cohesive way”. He didn’t think he was doing particularly well in these terms: “There wasn’t really anyone there, at least none of the teachers, that really had much time for my, well, let’s face it, fairly callow expressionism. Oh, my poor tortured soul kind of thing. Which I’ve actually never got over. But maybe I express it a bit better these days. I maybe could have done better had there been anybody there that was a bit more in sympathy with that sort of work, perhaps. But either way, I didn’t really do particularly well, I kind of just snuck through. But a lot of that was on me, too and I was starting to develop some quite serious mental health issues too which didn’t help.” he recounts. In fact, Mat had decided to leave at the end of his third year but credits his uncle with convincing him to finish the degree, which he did. At the same time however, Mat didn’t really see a future for himself in that world. “But I still didn’t know what I wanted to do at that point.”
While Mat had been studying in Christchurch his family moved to the Tasman district where his father took up the position of principal at Motueka High School. Mat started coming back to the area for his university holidays, doing a number of seasonal horticulture jobs, and he really started to take a shine to the area.
Having graduated with his Bachelor of Fine Arts, Mat says he still wanted to be doing art of some kind, but had no idea what that might be. “I was still kind of flailing, as I guess a lot of young people do at whatever age that was.” Mat travelled to Connecticut in the United States to stay with his aunty where he worked in her husband’s landscaping business for about six months before travelling through to London for about a year and a half, doing various jobs. While in the US, Mat did some painting in his aunty’s basement but in London, not so much. “There was too much partying, it was sort of the tail-end of that, of the heyday of the rave scene, which was all pretty exciting, and exhausting. The party would start Friday, it would end sometime Sunday and then you’d struggle through the week until the next Friday.”
After working as a kitchen hand in London, Mat decided to do a little bike tour in Scotland. “I’ve got a fair bit of Scottish ancestry, so I was like, ‘I’ve definitely got to go and check it out, go around Scotland then.’ So I bought a really shitty bike and kind of got fit, but not fit enough as it became abundantly obvious on the very first day.” After a short time though he built up some bike fitness and cycled for close to two months. “And so I got very fit, and when I came back I was like, ‘well, I’m not going back to that shitty minimum wage thing so maybe I’ll be a bike courier’. It probably took me two weeks to get over just being absolutely terrified the whole time but compared to my other job it was good money. I was making maybe three times as much. You get paid by the job, and if you’re fit and quick and willing to take ridiculous risks, you can make good money.”
"It was during this time that Mat did pretty much “any job that came along” and because none of these jobs were permanent ... Mat says he had a lot of time, living cheaply, to put into art..."
However the London winter eventually got the better of him, “And the cumulative effects of the non-stop partying, it got to me. I was like, I’ve got to go home. I’ve got to leave.” This was a decision he grew to regret as he moved back to New Zealand at the end of the northern hemisphere winter just in time for the beginning of the New Zealand winter.
After a spell living in Dunedin and then Wellington with his partner at the time he moved back to Tasman. “That’s when all of this mental health stuff that had been accumulating for some time kind of, the bomb went off. And that’s when I moved back here. And that was the end of that relationship, and the end of a lot of things, actually. But being back here was really good for me, and it dawned on me at some point, well, why would I leave?”
It was during this time that Mat did pretty much “any job that came along” and because none of these jobs were permanent or went throughout the entire year, Mat says he had a lot of time, living cheaply, to put into art. “But I’d decided to give up on painting at that point. Weirdly, at a point at which I actually felt that I was starting to find my feet.”
While living in Wellington he had started doing some commercial illustration. “I was trying to find my way into that, and find my way around Photoshop and that. All of that was very new to me and relatively new just in general. But I was still painting at the time and it was then that I sort of thought I was actually getting somewhere with my painting. Not in a career way at all, but just personally.” But he had also decided to move on artistically and with hindsight says of his paintings at the time, “I have a weird relationship with it, because it was at that time that my mental health was worsening rapidly. And I think the culmination of that and the need to start again had something to do with leaving that behind. I’d also started doing comics as well, which is something that I’ve always loved as a kid, it’s how I learned to draw. And there were a lot of great comics at that time that were coming out that were, well, at the time they were called alternative comics. But they were the 90s version of the underground comics of the 60s. But there was an idea that was coming to the fore that comics could be literature. They could be art. And there were a lot of very inspiring comics artists who were, I don’t know, sort of auteurs, I guess. Because they were writing and illustrating their own stuff.”
All of this, Mat says, was happening for him at the advent of what was later referred to as the graphic novel. Mat sums it up by saying, “You can see the ambitions in that, just in that kind of title. It’s not a comic, it’s a novel. It’s not a term that I think any of the artists working at that time who were producing these graphic novels actually liked because it was too pretentious. But they were making comics, and so was I.” However Mat says this process, for him, was a long one. “I produced a lot of stuff that I just threw away. I remember at one point, getting to nearly 60 pages into a long-form graphic novel. It was going to end up being probably around 200 pages, so I got quite a long way into it, then decided, this is rubbish, and I binned it. It took me a long time to actually feel that, like, oh yup, maybe some of this comic stuff that I’m doing is not too bad.”
There were many peaks and troughs through the years but Mat says there were “a couple of little breakthrough moments”. “One was when I was still living in Wellington, before I’d come back here. I had a short wordless short story accepted by a well respected French comics publisher L’Association.” A few years later he says, “I’d been tutu-ing away doing little short things that would get published here and there, and just self-published anthologies and stuff that hardly anyone would see. But I self-published a collection of those, and at least amongst the comics aficionados and fellow creators here, in this country, got a bit of notice, so I thought, “OK there’s something here.”
"There were many peaks and troughs through the years but Mat says there were “a couple of little breakthrough moments."
Then in 2015 Mat teamed up with a university friend, Mike Brown, to create his first widely published book The Heading Dog Who Split in Half. Says Mat, “I think it just came out of conversations that we were having. He was very interested, both personally and academically in what we would have called the New Zealand vernacular folk stories. By that I mean not so much pūrākau, pakiwaitara or those sorts of Māori stories, but postcolonial stories, where sometimes the two worlds, Te Ao Māori and Te Ao Pākeha would overlap. But they were very much post-contact, not so much postcolonial stories.”
The stars must have aligned during this period. “It was just one of those slightly lucky things. It just started out initially as us just mucking around together. I think the very first story that we did was the Heading Dog Who Split in Half, then I think we did another couple just for no other reason than it thrilled us. And then I think the idea came to one or other of us, probably Mike, that maybe we could do a book of these. I can’t remember exactly what the process was, but anyway eventually Potton & Burton agreed to publish it, and we managed to get, after several attempts, a very small amount of money from Creative New Zealand, but it was enough to get us cracking. And we finished the book, and both personally and professionally it was definitely a turning point because I had this thing out there in the world that was quite widely seen. And, well, it sold out.”
For a good chunk of time after the Heading Dog Who Split in Half came out, Mat continued to do some seasonal work and some design work while he also continued to make comics. But in the last while Mat has been able to survive wholly off his art. “That’s only really come in the last six to 10 years or so. Maybe I shouldn’t say this and put off any budding artists, but the only reason that I’m able to actually live off what I’m doing is because I’m very willing and able, because of my circumstances, to live on very little. I don’t know what is considered the poverty line in New Zealand, but I dare say most years I’m below that. If I was living in a city, well I don’t think I could. I don’t think it would actually be financially possible.”
Mat’s second widely published book was The Adventures of Tupaia with writer Courtney Sina Meredith. Mat recounts: “This book got partly funded because it was the 250th commemoration of the arrival of Cook and the Endeavour. There was a lot of controversy about it, which is why I call it a commemoration and not a celebration, and part of the kaupapa of this book was to put a bit of a spotlight on some of the very important but forgotten figures of that history, one of whom was Tupaia, a Tahitian navigator, sort of an ariki, or arioi I think is the Tahitian word. He was a very important man in his home and he jumped on board the Endeavour when it visited Tahiti. When they got to Aotearoa they discovered, much to everyone’s surprise, including his own, that he was able to talk, reasonably freely, with Iwi Māori here. He became, as the Endeavour travelled around the country, a very important figure here, in this country. He was clearly an intelligent, charismatic, interesting and good-looking man.”
It turned out Mat wasn’t the only person who felt Te Wehenga was a work of significance. In 2023, it won the Margaret Mahy Book of the Year at the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults, the supreme award, the gold medal of childrens’ literature in this country if you will. Te Wehenga also won the Elsie Locke Award for Non-Fiction. These accolades, at least to Mat himself, came out of the blue: “It was more than a surprise, it was a complete shock, actually.”
For many of Mat’s friends and the admirers of his work, this award felt like long overdue recognition for the outstanding qualities of his art, and an official place among the world of New Zealand literary superstars. Nothing summed up both Mat’s genuine surprise, the magnitude of the achievement and the modesty of the man himself than the video interview he did on breakfast TV the morning after the awards night. I asked Mat why he looked like somebody had hit him in the head with a hammer. “Yeah, well, I hadn’t slept. Well, I don’t know. It was a complete surprise. And, yeah, there was a photo taken by a photographer there. And I thought that they must have known in advance who was winning what, because they captured the exact moment when I found out. My older sister came with me to hold my hand and at the exact moment where they say who’d won, well I said, ‘fuck’ very loudly. And that’s what I’m doing right when the photo was taken, and my sister’s basically leaping out of her seat with joy. And it was one of those moments that, I don’t know, that very rarely gets captured. So I thought they must have surely known who to have the cameras on. But apparently not, apparently it was just total luck.”
Blog & photography by Brendan Alborn
Owner Operator
Brendan has a long association with the Abel Tasman, visiting it for the first time when his parents moved to Marahau in 1997. After spending much of his life overseas, Brendan and his family moved to the area at the end of 2010. When Brendan is not spending his time in the outdoors he seems to spend much of his time creating even flimsier justifications for spending more time in the outdoors.
