School of Art and Design - Te Kura Toi a Hoahoa
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Research within the School of Art and Design brings together visual artists, spatial designers, fashion designers, filmmakers, curators, entrepreneurs, graphic designers, digital designers, product designers and other cultural practitioners from New Zealand and around the world to work on expanded notions of art and design through creative-led research. Their research disciplines and study areas include: Visual Arts, Graphic Design, Spatial Design, Product Design, Digital Design, Fashion and Textile Design, and across disciplines.
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- ItemBee Movie(Brill, 2023-04-12) Denton, Andrew; Gibbons, AndrewBee Movie is a short film that invites questions for conversations on visual ethics. The viewer is invited into a world of circular, tragic and absurd questions concerning what a filmmaker, an abstract writer, a journal editor, and a film viewer ought to do when observing the apparent reality of a bee’s circular attempts to escape a pond. As a filmmaker and abstract writer, one does not want to tell the viewer and reader how one feels about this bee, bees, insects, ponds, water, life, death and circles. And one feels obliged not to explain the context through which the film came to life as the bee was engaged in efforts that might be narrated as lifesaving but also as another complex of efforts entirely. As an open image, without our textual dissection (or, at least, with a dampening of that dissection to an abstract and with a few questions and challenges), we regard Bee Movie as inviting questions about the ethics of the use of images as pedagogy. Whatever we thought about whether and how to share this film, we find ourselves in 359 other relationships, and always back again to what we assumed might be the starting position.
- ItemThe Dual Journey of Navigating the ‘Awa of Higher Education’ From a Māori Doctoral Student’s Lens(AUTSA, GRS and Tuwhera Open Access, 2023-03-08) Abraham, HazelFor many Māori students, staying in the main flow of the awa (river) is not easy in New Zealand’s mainstream education system. But with the right support mechanisms and structures in place, it is possible, for a Māori doctoral student to achieve educational success as Māori in higher education. This paper discusses what is entailed in the dual journey of a first in family, Māori doctoral student when completing a doctoral qualification alongside a Māori journey in strengthening connections within te Ao Māori (the Māori world). The narrative shares insights of the researcher’s experiences which led to the development of an Indigenous methodology model called ‘He Pūtauaki Model’. A number of key factors for ensuring her success as a Māori doctoral candidate was the continual support and guidance provided from kaumātua (elders), whānau (family), hapū (sub-tribe) and iwi (tribe), over a four-year period of completing the doctoral journey, and when a Mahitahi approach was adopted by her supervisors and reinforced by other Te Ipukarea Research Institute postgraduate students made a difference for her in overcoming the challenges that an Indigenous Māori doctoral student can face when navigating the awa (structural mechanisms and psychosocial challenges) at Auckland University of Technology (AUT).
- ItemArjun: A Creative Exploration of Worldbuilding To Discuss Cultural Dislocation and Belonging(Universidade Anhembi Morumbi, ) Arjun Wilson, Damian; Tavares, TatianaThis article will discuss concepts of cultural dislocation and belonging through a practice-led worldbuilding design project called Arjun. Arjun is a creative exploration of storytelling through a designed publication that uses diagrams, notations, and photographic manipulations to explore a character’s experience in a foreign land. The publication presents a polyphonic story from the perspective of Arjun who is hired by the fictional corporation Federation (F.E.D.R) to explore a land where both familiar and unfamiliar takes place. Arjun searches for his sense of purpose and identity, in a self-dialogue with his own dislocation. Established within the tenants of Hinduism, this research project stimulates speculative meanings through worldbuilding design as means to discuss my cultural dislocation with my own Fijian Indian ancestry. Conceptually, the project is concerned with the philosophical principles of Hindu reincarnation, its relationships to the subconscious mind (Callander & Cummings, 2021) and liminality (Turner, 1969; Ipomoea, 2015). The article will discuss how practice emerged both conceptually and visually through a synthesis between theory and making in its creation and conceptualisation. Reflective processes and self-search methodologies are utilised to access personal experiences and prominent levels of exploration with materials through the methods of notation, journaling, copywriting, image processing and prototyping.
- ItemApplying a Kaupapa Māori Paradigm to Researching Takatāpui Identities(School of Art and Design, AUT, ) Paora, TIn this practice-led doctoral thesis I adopt a Kaupapa Māori paradigm, where rangahau (gathering, grouping and forming, to create new knowledge and understanding), is grounded in a cultural perspective and Māori holistic worldview that is respectful of tikanga Māori (customs) and āhuatanga Māori (cultural practices). The case study that forms the focus of the presentation asks, “How might an artistic reconsideration of gender role differentiation shape new forms of Māori performative expression”. In addressing this, the researcher is guided and upheld by five mātāpono (principles): He kanohi kitea (a face seen, is appreciated) Titiro, whakarongo, kōrero (looking, listening and speaking) Manaakitangata (sharing and hosting people, being generous) Kia tūpato (being cautious) Kāua e takahi i te mana o te tangata (avoiding trampling on the mana of participants). In connecting these principles and values that are innate within te ao Māori (Māori people and culture) the paper unpacks a distinctive approach taken to interviewing and photographing nine takatāpui tāne (Māori males whose sexuality and gender identification are non-heteronormative). These men’s narratives of experience form the cornerstone of the inquiry that has a research focus on tuakiritanga (identity) where performative expression and connectivity to Māori way of being, causes individuals to carry themselves in distinctive ways. The lived experience of being takatāpui within systems that are built to be exclusive and discriminatory is significant for such individuals as they struggle to reclaim a place of belonging within te ao Māori, re-Indigenise whakaaro (understanding), and tangatatanga (being the self). In discussing a specifically Māori approach to drawing the poetics of lived experience forward in images and text, the presentation considers cultural practices like kaitahi (sharing of food and space), kanohi ki te kanohi kōrero (face to face interviewing), and manaakitangata (hosting with respect and care). The paper then considers the implications of working with an artistic collaborator (photographer), who is not Māori and does not identify as takatāpui yet becomes part of an environment of trust and vulnerable expression. Finally, the paper discusses images surfacing from a series of photoshoots and interviews conducted between August 2021 and February 2023. Here my concern was with how a participant’s identitiy and perfomativity might be discussed when preparing for a photoshoot, and then reviewing images that had been taken. The process involved an initial interview about each person’s identitiy, then a reflection on images emanating from studio session. For the shoot, the participant initially dressed themseleves as the takatāpui tāne who ‘passed’ in the world and later as the takatāpui tāne who dwelt inside. For the researcher, the process of titiro, whakarongo, kōrero (observing, listening and recording what was spoken), resourced a subsequent creative writing exercise where works were composed from fragments of interviews. These poems along with the photographs and interviews, constituted portraits of how each person understood themself as a self-realising, proud, fluid and distinctive Māori individual.
- ItemKO WAI AU? Who am I?(School of Art and Design, AUT, ) Williams, TThis presentation accounts a journey of the researcher’s practice-led doctoral project, Tangohia mai te taura: Take This Rope. The study involves researching, directing and producing a documentary about historical grievances to exhume stories from a Māori filmmaker’s community that call into question colonial accounts of the 1866 execution of their ancestor Mokomoko, and the preceding murder of the Reverend Carl Sylvius Völkner in 1885. As a consequence of an accusation of murder, Mokomoko was arrested for the crime, imprisoned and hanged, all the while protesting his innocence. In retribution, our people had their coveted lands confiscated by the government, and they became the pariahs of multiple historical accounts. The practice-led thesis study asks how a Māori documentary maker from this iwi (tribe) might reach into the grief and injustice of such an event in culturally sensitive ways to tell the story of generational impact. Accordingly, the documentary Ko Wai Au, seeks to communicate an individual’s reconnection to, and understanding of, accumulated knowledge and experience, much of which is stored inside an indigenous, dispossessed whānau (family), whose whakapapa (genealogy) is interwoven with historical events and their implications. As a member of a generation that has been incrementally removed from history and embodied pain of my whanau, through the study I come seeking my past in an effort to understand and contribute something useful that supports my people’s aspirations and agency in attaining value, healing, and historical redress. This presentation advances a distinctive embodied methodological approach based on whenua (land) and whanau (family). In this approach, the researcher employs karakia (traditional incantations), walking the land, thinking, listening to waiata (traditional songs) and aratika (feeling a ‘right’ way). My position is one of humility and co-creation. I am aware that the rōpū kaihanga kiriata (film crew) with whom I work will be called into the trusting heart of my whānau and we must remain attentive to Māori protocols and sensitivities. Given the responsibility of working inside a Kaupapa Māori research paradigm, methodology and methods are shaped by kawa and tikanga (customary values and protocols). Here one moves beyond remote analysis and researches sensitively ‘with’ and ‘within’, a community, knowing that te ao Māori (the Māori world) is at the core of how one will discover, record, and create.