This work centres on a private archive of ancestral photographs dating to the 1800s — Exploring the tension between oral tradition and fragmented photographic evidence, through themes of loss, survival, and return through the lens of my whakapapa (roots, lineage, family) and colonial-era documentation.
Artist Statement
"E kore au e ngaro; he kākano i ruia mai i Rangiātea."
I will never be lost; I am a seed sown from Rangiātea.
In Māori culture, knowledge has always been passed down orally — through elders, through story, through presence. It is not a written culture. Each time an elder passes, a gap opens in our understanding that cannot be filled.
It wasn't until the late 1700s, when colonial powers arrived on our shores, that our people began to be recorded — first in paintings, then in photographs brought by European settlers in the 1850s. A new kind of memory, but also a new kind of loss.
My grandmother stood at the forefront of our tribe. A keeper of knowledge, a bridge between generations. But time keeps moving, and with every passing day her memory becomes harder to hold. Events blur. Details dissolve. Faces of relatives once easily recalled, now unrecognisable. Family turned into strangers.
In recent years there has been a resurgence in our culture — people reconnecting with who they are and where they truly come from. In tracing my own whakapapa — our word for lineage, for roots — I came across a collection of photographs, an archive kept hidden by my grandmother. Images that reach back to the 1800s. Absent from wider history, almost as if they never existed — yet here they are, held in my hands.
This is all that remains. Fragmented memories. Whispers from the past. Speculations can be made about who some of these people were and what they carried, but the only certainty we have that they existed at all are these photographs.
The full scope of their story is impossible to know. Lost through time.
"He taonga tonu te wareware"
Forgetfulness is an enduring property.
But the seed remains.