// Rēkohu on film //
Exhibition accompanying essay for Kia ora Whaea - Corban Estate Arts Centre, Tāmaki Makaurau
“Yeah he is nine now (how did that happen?) and I take my smaller sort-of double to art galleries sometimes. I would like to tell you that he goes willingly, wide-eyed and hungry for it but the truth is sometimes I bribe him with Angry BirdsTM and ice-cream promises. “Oh Muuuuuum” he says, exasperated, drawing out the “aaaaah” between the ms, in his sassy, sing-song, pleading, maybe even mocking kind of way. One time, we went to a show about things missing and he said something like “This one is my favourite. It’s like it’s glitching out. Like the person who made it is playing games with us but we kind of know what it is because of the colours. It makes me feel weird. Like someone’s watching me” and then he said “Ok can we go now?” and I stood there for a second a little bit dumbfounded, a little bit impressed, and a little bit hōhā all at once like “Who even are you?” I wanted to say “Tell me what you think of all of them though, every single one, I want to know I need to know” but instead I said “Yeah, okay” and I started counting my change to see if we had enough for two scoops of salted caramel ice-cream on the way back to the car.“
from “māmā | maru” for Kia Ora Whaea exhibition (Corban Estate Arts Centre)
Ngā mihi to the amazing artists for their mahi and for the opportunity to try wrangle these past ten years of thoughts into something x and as always all the aroha to my tama for teaching me all the things (including obscure mokonui facts and the net worths of various YouTubers as well as all the existential life things on the daily) x
Exhibition text for “Legacy Issues: Lens-Based Investigations of Waitaha Canterbury Whenua” - a kōrero with Emily Lazare
Feat: MITCHELL BRIGHT /CONOR CLARKE /ELLA HICKFORD /MOANA LEE /MIKE O’KANE /TIM J. VELING HANNAH WATKINSON - Ashburton Art Gallery, 27 April - 14 June, 2024
// \\ piki, heke (or “floundering with friends” - exhibition text for Peaks and Troughs - Conor Clarke and friends, Jonathan Smart Gallery, Aug 18 - Sept 16, 2023
“We are all of us caught by something
And yet there is no net, new or otherwise, that can hold this: taumaha
Snares lie, suspended
And the mystery of what’s missing is almost abated
By the delicacy of a drawn out departure
We can make something of the leaving though, you know
Gather up the debris
Weed in instead of out
Find the tohu in the tuuhono and all that
Auee
Well, here is as good a place as any”
hello friends we made cool things for a cool thing!
our contribution to The Physics Room’s Issue No. 2 of Correspondence Vol. 1 features a tamafreaky collab (chur Āio and Kāhu) and includes Godzilla, rainbow arero, nick(ed) names, and other such silliness (but also super-seriousness too, of course) - and heaps-rad kupu / musical offerings by Kommi aka Komme
ps - “pīrata” means to be conspicuous (and watch out for those rinorino wera)
love yous (massive mihi to Hamish and The Physics Room fam)
“Little by little // their conversations unpeel
like bright foil // from forbidden sweets”
Emma Neale
Ōtepoti // Koputai // Aramoana
Rupture
We go to the shores of the lagoon to look for sharks’ teeth; the dark and tiny fossils wink amidst the sand and shell rubble and the washed up weed that is too green to look at for too long. Wind doesn’t want us there. Wind pushes our hair into our eyes, our mouths, fills our ears with the sound of going home. He wades to the depth where the water begins to invade his gumboots. He wants it in there and doesn’t want it in there; knew what would happen and let it happen. He looks at me – his eyes asking for something I do not have; for something I would like to give him but can’t.
Sometimes there is no going back.
They don’t say “I’m going down the lake to look for sharks’ teeth” here; they say “I’m going sharks’ teething”. It is its own thing, understood. And most who live here have a story of a rare find or know someone else’s story of a rare find and both of these they will share with you if you are lucky; if you are luckier still, you might even get to hold those polished morsels of local gold whose once-sharp edges might now fit snuggly in the hollow of your hand. Their shape and weight and age are things we marvel at: they are delicate and heavy at once; they are smooth and scarless, charcoal-coloured ruptures in time. Over numerous visits, I have found a few of their tiny counterparts and plucked them from the shore. Some now reside in the ashtray of the slowly-rusting truck as proof for other visitors should their searches be fruitless. See, we will say, offering them up. They’re there. They’re everywhere once you get an eye for them.
If you listen carefully, you can hear them dance within their confines, harmonious with the sounds of shingle, the popping and sliding going on beneath us.
At night, I picture the many small, grey arrowheads pointing; the thousands of tiny claw-like remnants poised in their places on mantelpieces and bookshelves, and the ones collectively gathering dust inside pāua shell receptacles; the others kept safe inside jewellery boxes beside rings passed down and lonely earrings missing their twins.
I don’t wonder so much about why this place in particular, I wonder more about the what-ifs – the running out of things. Words like “fossick” and “accumulation” and “collection” are hard to think about – harsh to say – even when they’re whispered. I think about the strangeness of it all: this remote and windswept repository I too have thought fit to rummage through; the rattling of relics inside a plastic cage; the water lingering still, in the bottom of our boots.
This is the lasting image preventing sleep: close up – the lonely tooth of a long-dead shark lying in a velvet-lined box; zoom out – and there are rows and rows and rows of them, always another to take another’s place, the uniform and polished wooden boxes, the velvet lining in deepest blue; the teeth, the teeth, the teeth.
Originally published in Stasis Journal 2021
“… if I am somehow, miraculously, bodied then /
my skin is a collage of meditations on love and shattered selves”
Billy-Ray Belcourt (This Wound is a World)
Tongue || Tide (and musings on vulnerability, collaboration, and the beauty and weirdness and hilariousness and awesomeness of learning te reo Māori ) is out in the world now, via Correspondence Issue 1 - published by The Physics Room.
Big ups to Kommi for saying “ok” to doing the thing with me and the ever-encouraging and lovely Hamish for bringing me in on the kaupapa. And, as always, thanks to the ika (and all that inquisitive water that I continue to return to whatever the weather).
Mauri ora, e kare mā
I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.
Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar
What to do when you don’t have the name of a poet
1. Spend some time mourning the fact. Write a lament for all the ones you wish you had but never will. Briefly reconsider your stance on marriage and name-taking.
Remember this is folly. Return to your mourning.
2. Appeal to the atua. Call upon your tūpuna. Surely they’ve got one saved for situations just like this. Apologise for not getting in touch for a while. I mean, part of the reason why you haven’t is the reason why you haven’t, right?
Wait for an answer as long as you can.
3. Call your parents. Ask them again why they chose this one for you. Demand a more satisfactory reason than the one they have previously provided. Tell them that this – all of this – the half-empty notebooks, the decorative how-to-guides, the paper crumbs leading back into the wood are all their fault and that you are not responsible for the consequences of their poor decision-making.
4. Think about the loved ones and say them out loud to yourself.
They go: 2 syllables, 3 syllables. Or: 3 syllables, 2 syllables. Or: 2 syllables, 2 syllables 1.
Think about the 2 syllable, 2 syllable poets and their beautiful symmetry.
Alas for you, you 2 syllable, 1 syllable wannabe.
5. Toy with the idea of using initials.
Think about how maybe this is a convention usually followed by fantasy authors. Think about how this will affect the vibe you are going for.
Go back to step 1.
6. Consider using a nom de plume.
Bonus points for a) alliteration b) assonance c) Shakespearian characters d) Greek goddesses e) colours f) hyphens (the cool kind) g) animals (preferably the strong, the beautiful, and the rare).
7. Steal one. Some people aren’t even using theirs to their full potential. You’d be doing them a favour and your exes owe you anyway. How dare they walk around at home in the world with names like that, unburdened by metaphor and untethered to the quest for lyrical absolution.
8. Draw on the greats for inspiration: see the seawomen rising from their oceanic abodes, swampland spiders sporting tokotoko, and houses still standing in the midst of the apocalypse - all of them wriggling their backbones towards you, revelling in possibility.
9. Laugh about it. There is nothing you can do to rectify this unfortunate situation.
10. Cry about it. There is nothing you can do to rectify this unfortunate situation.
11. Lather.
12. Rinse.
13. Repeat.
14. Anonymous?
15. Admit to yourself that you want them to know it was you.
“I hate slick and pretty things. I prefer mistakes and accidents. Which is why I like things like cuts and bruises - they're like little flowers. I've always said that if you have a name for something, like 'cut' or 'bruise,' people will automatically be disturbed by it. But when you see the same thing in nature, and you don't know what it is, it can be very beautiful.”
David Lynch
rēkohu shell study
And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
ngāhere study // kākāriki dreaming
