Haerenga

Ten years ago I left my home in a waka without a sail. Rūaumoko the earthquake deity shook the foundations of New Zealand’s colonial gem with unforgiving tremors. Corpses were pulled from the rubble, spirits lowered into it, and Christchurch reckoned with a truth. Before its postcards with pastures and parasols, it was a swamp called Ōtautahi. First I went to the motherland with its halls of stolen artefacts, then to the colony without a treaty, Te Whenua o Moemoeā, The Land of Dreaming. I was living by kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua:walking backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on the past.

Yet leaving one place for another means grappling with the paradox of amputation, where getting away means leaving something behind. Sometimes there’s no choice but to leave. Other times we want something more. Migration offers a new horizon, but is the decision ever truly ours? Are we being pulled, pushed, or both? Today, New Zealanders leave Aotearoa in droves for places like Australia, and while this might seem like a new phenomena, cultural migration has been happening longer than we’d like to think, but where did it all begin?

Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, also known as The Pacific Ocean, is characterised by migration. Waves of human dispersal were met by interludes of cultural adaptation where the foundations of whakapapa were laid. In the tides’ callings, the wind returned to the sail and the voyaging tradition unfolded across the horizon. From the gifts and omens that came and went, ancestral feats sit within our collective memory as a wellspring of mana. Like Te maroro kokoti ihu waka taua, the flying fish that crosses the bow of the war canoe, Māori sit at the helm of the Pacific’s migrational story.

On the other side of the world, another voyaging tradition ensued, one set to conquer a new world. A quest led by economics, otherwise known as colonialism, crept in like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, disguising its legitimacy as the civilising mission, the white man’s burden, the legacy of progress.

The so-called new world presented an infantilised version of Europe. Settlers viewed Aotearoa as a garden to be tamed, controlled, and bent to the divine right of kings. As “civilisation” advanced since this invasion, so too has inequality and alienation between coloniser and original inhabitants., The economic system as we know it has become the most dangerous religion of all. But a bad penny finds its own way to hell. Each day we come closer to a precipice, a departure from the destructive and dehumanising system of colonial capitalism, a Rerenga, or leap of faith, into another new world.

My art is an interrogation of the past, peeling back its layers where history and nightmares are indistinguishable. Through a cartoonish style inspired by fantasy and horror, my practice digs into both personal and cultural memory to reveal a mythology which reflects the experience of being positioned between worlds. Theobserver is invited into the interrogation, to sit with tension and uncertainty, but to also provoke curiosity towards the unknown. In blurring the lines between time and place, Haerenga pieces fragments of a broken vessel back together, to show that every story has already been told before.

Connecting migration from the past to the present, Haerenga returns to a time in many ways similar to our own. It pays homage to those who lived through a times where practices were interrupted and solid ground became shaky. It is in honour of how–in spite of the shaky ground– they saw another way, and rebuilt. By knowing the wisdom, critiques, labours, and spirit of our ancestors we pick up what they left behind and the future becomes all the more certain.