Kōrero Toi: Here Here Collective

KŌRERO TOI | ISSUE SIX | MAHI Ā-RINGA / CRAFT

Written by Jeorja Duffy (she/her) @jeorjaduffy & Te Ra Awatea Kemp (she/her) @te.ra.kemp | Contributing Writers @herehere.co

We, Jeorja Duffy (Ngāti Kuri, Sa’fanene, Pākehā) and Te Ra Awatea Kemp (Ngāti Raukawa, Te Ātiawa, Pākehā), both embrace craft at the heart of our art practices. Through generational craft, we utilise knowledge such as crochet and quilting in our personal artworks. Working with the handmade, we found common ground for collaboration through the customary Māori craft of braiding, weaving, and netting. Here Here is our artist collective, we work from a whanaungatanga kaupapa to inform our making and installation of textile sculptures. When it comes to craft as a mode of making, we speak to the three pillars of our kaupapa: familial guidance, action as record, and material agency, all of which are foundational. 

Both coming from Indigenous backgrounds within our immediate families, familial relationships consisting of constant conversation between family members serve as guiding advice and a grounding for our artworks made together. Chatting is present at every crafting step. When we kōrero, we combine two whole generations' worth of knowledge to solve the ‘problems’ our art throws back at us. A missed stitch here or an undoing of braiding there is caught, countered together, and acknowledged, while also resolved. We don’t necessarily remove what did not work, but we take that experience into account and craft from it. Thus, avoiding that outcome in the future: the stitcher’s troubleshooting for dummies informed by tūpuna wisdom. 

As is the nature of mahi tahi, when we work together on our large-scale pieces, what would normally be hard-going and a time-consuming craft for one person, becomes an enjoyable (yet conceptual) flowing conversation between two friends. Our braiding action is a recording of information and can be understood as words shared. When woven into a form, the action as record becomes a written dialogue accessible for a viewer to be part of through their physical presence in the sculptural installation. 

While crafting, we are aware of the fabrics we use and their material agency. To put it into simple terms, every fabric we craft with comes laden with a network of human connections. In Jeorja’s personal art practice, artworks are made from her mum’s clothing, crocheted as an autobiography of her childhood and relationship to her mum in the present. Her crochet, a labour of love, is in reciprocation of the care and support her mum has given throughout her life. For Te Ra Awatea, domestic linens are cherished and repaired over decades of familial use by her grandmother. When incorporated into an artwork like a quilt, it materially imbues the quilt with the significance of her relationship to her tupuna. By handstitching together the domestic linens, it is an appreciation for the hours of love her grandmother gave her and a testament to the lasting impact family members have on the children they help raise.

All of this is to say that by acknowledging material agency and responding to it through our modes of craft, the process of craft is a reciprocation of love and an honouring of that gift of love through material.