I had a dream once, years ago, that I still remember vividly. I am standing in the middle of a river, and I am staring at the face of a young boy. The air is hazy and ethereal, a heavy mist, the kind that you can only find floating on top of a body of water. The boy has dark brown skin, and dark brown eyes, and dark brown hair. We are standing in the water. We don’t speak. There is a shared knowledge or understanding. A kind of peace, or maybe a potency. I’m staring at him and then I hear an echo in my head. It’s loud, and surrounds us. It’s a voice, but it doesn’t seem to come from a person or a body. It just is. I think the boy is communicating to me in my head, without words. Like telepathy I suppose. He stares at me and I hear the word ‘papoose, papoose’. And then I wake up.

It’s a Sunday afternoon and I’ve rushed to the gallery to meet Nat, Kiriana and Eleanor. I’m late, but it’s okay because it’s Sunday and I’m in Tāmaki and time is a construct. Lol. 

This is my first time meeting them in the flesh. We met online a couple of weeks ago and we let the conversation wander, snaking its way around us and through us and finding its own legs, threading together what could just be coincidence, but what feels like strange and strong connections between us. 

One of the first things we do is eat a meal together. Even though it’s the first time many of us are meeting each other, it feels chill and I think it’s the comfort of knowing we’re in a safe place. We’re all women coming together without pretence and we’re drinking warm beer and talking with our mouths full and Eleanor has a broken arm so we take turns serving her up food and she is thankful.

Nat’s son is in the gallery space playing video games. I think about the gallery’s name mothermother and that we carry within us as humans, mostly, the potential for life. We’re vessels with many other purposes yes, but we’re vessels, bodies that hold pasts and futures and generations within us. Eyes, hearts and teeth. Life.

Papoose

Pango/uliuli/black

Kiriana is obsessed with the colour black at the moment. Her big woven piece on the wall, Te Rauaroha hanging opposite Eleanor’s ropes, is like an abstract painting. Its thick, black weave and weft, with lighter coloured patterns woven through it. 

The angles and precision in her piece are in contrast to the haphazard loops of Eleanor’s ropes. 

Kiriana says that the colour black has so much meaning in Māori mythology. Te kore. Te pō. Prestate and then darkness.

Black is too, of course, the colour of death in many cultures. What comes after death? We live these fragile lives afraid. 

I think of Eleanor’s pūriri moth. Prestate. Darkness. What comes after death? Blackness. Death. Rebirth? Maybe we’re all just caterpillars.

I think of the Vā, a potent space that as much as I try I can’t wrap my head around fully, just touching it sides every now and then. I think dreams come from the Vā space, where knowledge subsists and wends its way into your subconscious when you need to know something. Past selves talking to present selves. Ancestors immanence. It’s always there, ever-present.

As we sit there together, eating, talking, drinking, sharing space, I am wondering what I will write about, what threads I will eventually draw together to make something cohesive to present to the world, or at least a very small part of it.

It’s all significant, every weft and weave of Kiriana’s kete kupenga Te Kurawaka, and the bright red dyed flax that Kiriana says a big black lump of obsidian will sit in the middle of. Red, the colour of blood, that flows freely, glowing. 

Tuna

I dream of eels constantly. Swimming and writing in the front yard of my parents’ house one night. Swimming and writhing in their backyard the next. What messages is the Vā sending to me? I can’t decipher, but I let it sit with me. My mum says it's to do with navigation and where I’m at in my life. I don’t disagree. In my dream I feed the eels big chunks of bloody flesh. They are hungry. 

So much effort goes into the making of an artwork. The harvesting of the materials. The dyeing of the rope or the harakeke. The making of it. The thinking alone, of concepts, of symbols. The narrative. 

I go back to Pepe, my poetry book that is still sitting in my Google Drive, untouched for at least two years. I feel guilty about neglecting it.

Return to the pūriri moth, to the pepetuna, and think about this exhibition, a mere glimpse really, a snapshot in time that although, yes, is significant, is not all that these works are made for. It doesn’t account for the hours spent weaving, the time spent dyeing ropes and researching privet and the emotion and the labour and the process and the counsel. Yes, as Kiriana says, weaving calms her, bringing her to a state of mauri tau, a state of ease, or a meditative fugue. 

Maybe I am learning to appreciate the making more, the harvesting of the flax. 

Just like this piece of writing is an accumulation of threads, it’s not all the threads and it’s not all that I am. It’s an offering that will be read by some, maybe many but probably less. It’s my story though. And it is not confined to any predestiny. Unlike the moth, I can give my words a mouth. Here it is, open wide. A mouth that speaks from the depths of my soul, reaching far into the Vā space, out into my dreams. 

I return to my dream. Papoose. I stare at the boy and his eyes are familiar, eyes that I have known since before I was born, eyes that stare into the future. Papoose. Wahakura. Kete Kupenga. Womb. A thing to hold something. A blank sheet to hold a story. A tree trunk to hold a caterpillar. A kete to hold a thing you value. A body to hold a throbbing heart.

Papoose. Your eyes are mine. Pepe. My butterfly. My promise of life.