As a child of the 1970s and 80s Britain, growing up with an evocative soundtrack of iconic music, comedy, TV, film, and historic storytelling of wartime suffering and resilience, was certainly common for most children. What that upbringing did do for me personally was to provide me with a sensory appreciation of everything around me, from paintings on the wall, to wallpaper fabric, to the texture of carpet, nostalgic objects, my great aunt’s perfume and the sound of doors opening and closing, each contributing to how I navigated through my childhood and subsequently went on to shape my adulthood and my creative process. To my eternal regret, I never recorded the voices and well versed family narratives that came from my grandparents or the wider elder members of the family.

The preservation and archiving of my family histories exist within the playlist in my head, whilst the inner anxiety of maintaining these narratives for future generations weighs heavily on me. The Tiaki Project , the focus for this practical research-based study, will attempt to explore and investigate, via proof of concept design outcomes and material experimentation, the potential for an interactive audio-visual experience for sharing/archiving historical cultural and community narratives. The core intention of The Tiaki Project is centred around the documentation of history via the personal narratives and origin stories from the heart of the Pukekohe/Franklin community to the south of Auckland, Aotearoa, New Zealand. Questions which focus on ‘What defines a community and what contributes to a community identity?’ are those which will be explored and reflected upon as part of both the contextual study, case studies and research, as well as through the realisation of proof-of-concept outcomes and material experimentation.

The Tiaki Project has been a culmination of reflections from previous personal historical documentary artworks which have been steeped in archiving community narratives for the purpose of preservation and celebration. The artwork below (Fig 1) is an engraving of the classic Flox Damask Velvet Wallpaper which adorned many walls within my grandparents’ house in South London. The mere sight, let alone the tactile response, evokes a myriad of memories, voices, stories and experiences, whilst the piece of timber came from a 115-year-old tree which fell at my house in Onewhero, New Zealand in 2013. These two material artefacts have been grafted together to represent the fusion of significant layers of time. The Tiaki Project’s heart and motivation will inevitably return to this work to reconnect me, to re-establish the reasons for human connections and generational narrative archiving which has existed consistently within my work.