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Mending the Kupenga: Towards a Language of Reciprocity Between Ancestral Textile & Storytelling Practices

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Exegesis(203.5 MB)

Date

2024

Authors

Supervisor

Redmond, Monique
Robertson, Natalie
Smith, Mandy

Item type

Exegesis

Degree name

Doctor of Philosophy

Journal Title

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Volume Title

Publisher

Auckland University of Technology

Abstract

Anchored by my Taranaki Māori and Scottish/Irish Pākehā whakapapa, this research explores how aho (threads) of ancestral narratives can be re-storied and, potentially, restored through textile craft knowledge passed down through my maternal lines. This conversational in-process artmaking practice builds a language of reciprocity between my textile, poetry, and storytelling practices to strengthen relationships held within the kupenga — the relational net. The metaphor of kupenga is utilised to describe the connections, tensions, and entanglements of relational spaces. I investigate how weaving practices might, over time, offer pathways towards repairing familial disconnections and ruptures embedded in settler-colonial amnesia and dislocation. Working with whakapapa (relationality/genealogies/layering), whatuora (weaving/ envisioning), and storywork* as methodologies, my artmaking utilises processes of place-based material gathering, 'happenings,' poetic storytelling, and fibre craft in order to (re)weave connections to place. Comprised of body-scale “whatu-weavings,” my artworks blend whatu, weaving, and lacemaking textile-craft techniques made on hand-crafted warp-weighted looms. Collected river stones are both loom-weights anchoring the weaving in place, and hagstones or seeing-stones for envisioning the practice. My practice continues both as tauira (student, pupil, apprentice) and with tauira (samples, models, or examples), incorporating a multiplicity of blended fibre techniques and materials from across my ancestral lines. Through the pūtahi — considered here as moments and places of encounter and exchange, and intersections of materials and practices across cross-cultural lines — my research advocates for the revival, sustenance, and continued innovation of ancestral practices. Through (re)growing a multi-sensory and ceremonial knowledge of tidal, seasonal, and celestial cycles, gathering from and tending to the taiao (environment) leads to a deeper intimacy and relation with place. The research finds its significance in developing an art practice centred in place and relation, grown through conversation and observation, and always with the intent to unpick and re-weave, reclaim and restore, towards a more reciprocal future.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10292/18330

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Doctoral Theses