Towards a Language
of Reciprocity Between Ancestral Textile & Storytelling Practices

Doctoral Research Project, 2021 – 2024

Mending the Kupenga considers how threads of ancestral narratives can be re-storied and, potentially, restored through textile craft knowledge passed down through maternal lines. Anchored by my Taranaki Māori and Scottish/Irish Pākehā whakapapa, this conversational in-process artmaking practice builds a language of reciprocity between 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, whatuora, and storywork as methodologies, my artmaking utilises place-based material gathering, poetic storytelling, and fibre craft processes in order to (re)weave connections to place. Looking to the pūtahi — considered as moments 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. The research finds its significance in developing an art practice centred in place and relations, grown through conversation and observation, and always with the intent to unpick and re-weave, reclaim and restore, towards a more reciprocal future.

Exegesis can be found on Tuwhera, the AUT Research Repository