Mnemonic Sculptures: Crafting Pūrākau with the Tools My Tūpuna Gave Me

Abstract

Pūrākau have always kept company with craft. From woven panels that adorn marae walls to intricate carvings in wood or skin, twisted cords and braided fibres are all visual expressions of realities turned stories. The past in te ao Māori is to be learnt from, by those of us in the present, to guide our descendants into a thriving future. Stories are the lens through which I see life, and crafting is the mouthpiece I have available to me to delineate them to the next generation.

In this practice-based research project, I have explored how crafting from a Kaupapa Māori paradigm can visually secure and further pass on our oral histories-become-story to our future successors. Stemming from my research into how Indigenous pedagogies utilise storytelling to communicate essential knowledge, as well as the role that physical taonga undertake in conveying ancestral memories, I have developed my own processes of engaging with these customs via my art practice, through soft sculptures.

By experimenting with ways of communication through a craft that documents differently from Māori verbal records or Pākehā written formats, I have developed new ways of securing oral histories within story quilts and through deliberate action in collaborative net-making. Materials rich with personal connections, generational crafting skills, and body movement as note-taking all contribute to the layers of story in each of my artworks.

Collaboration with family, friends, and tūpuna has grounded the research and continually centred my art practice to where I needed to be to answer my questions. My artwork is made with our stories: for them, for us, for who is to come, to prevail forever.