Urban Dream Brokerage Gallery
113 Taranaki St
Wellington
Friday 15th -17th November
Online til sold out
This is a story about dirt
This is a story about dirt
And this story begins with a mountain
Ko Aoraki te mauka
Ko Waihao te awa
Ko Uruao rāua ko Takitimu ōku waka
Ko Waitaha rātou ko Kāi Tahu ko Kāti Māmoe ōku iwi
Ko Kāti Huirapa tōku hapū
Ko Waihao tōku marae
Ko Tākuta Ruby Solly tōku ikoa
He wahine whaiarorua ahau
I live most parts of my life in strange dichotomies. I work in healthcare, and I live with a severe mental illness. I work as a practitioner of taonga pūoro within hauora, and I take psychiatric medication to stay alive. I believe in matakitetanga, and I have survived psychosis. Sometimes, It's in the spaces where two things can happen at once, that things get really interesting. Difficult? Always. But sometimes it’s difficult in a way that broadens the horizons, that shows both halves of the story at once.
This is a story about dirt
It’s a story about how we exist as the fullness
of all of our parts
Overlaid and intersected
From the top of Aoraki we can see across all of this story. We can see that there really is no true beginning, middle, or end of it. It’s a landscape that we have drawn a narrative through. Streams of story braiding themselves into rivers. There are some streams we will explore together, we’ll look deeply into the waters and see what lies there. And there are others that are just for me to swim in. But when we reach the ocean, it’ll all be the same water. We’ll be swimming together.
All of our streams go through a timespace together. For me, a timespace is another way I can explain an episode, or a series of experiences, both spiritual and psychological, that connect together in a kind of constellation. This is a timespace. Each timespace has themes to it, stories that intersect and tohu to be read. The timespace we are going to look at is placed during Matariki this year. There were lots of things that were added to the primordial soup that would grow into this confluence. But when we go back to our view from te hiku of Aoraki, we can see where things seperate and combine.
I’d recently handed in my PhD, and I’d had a very rough three months where I was taken off and put back on lithium due to several bad pieces of medical advice. I was working away from home on tour, and was long distance co-ordinating a whānau medical event that was made ever harder by the disability that seems to disable me in society more than it does within my own body and mind. I’d been given three bad pieces of news back to back on the first anniversary of a friend's death. I was left in a position where I needed so much, and had so little. So, a timespace was made to call in everything I had, to make me and my timeline twist and turn.
This is a story about dirt.
Dirt is speaking to you,
not with words, but with how it sounds.
How it vibrates and beckons.
There is a voice in your head telling you to find the sacred gash in the cliff
Plunge your hands into the red
as you call in what sparks are still in the air.
Craft it into a baby
With a mouth you can sing into.
Sing into its mouth
Then feed it red milk from your breast
But you don’t do it. I, don’t do it. But this becomes a theme in the timespace. Dirt was very important. It felt like the dirt was almost speaking, like I could feel its intentions and origins moving towards me. A kind of language that comes before language itself. During the beginning of this timespace, I was on working away from home. A personal nightmare and fear of mine is having an episode when I’m away, and is part of why I get a bit angsty about things like overseas ‘opportunities’ (read, I’m a taonga pūoro practitioner and my responsibilities are fundamentally to this place and its people). But I was also staying on whenua that I whakapapa to, deep down South. And as the land was talking to me, I was talking back.
Pūoro, as in taonga pūoro, can be thought of as a ‘pre-reo’. A concept brought to me by two of my mentors; Rob Thorne, and Hinewirangi Kohu Morgan. Oro provides a way to move pure intentions into sound, and out into the world. It takes away the harm that words can cause and shows us where we truly are with how we feel and sit within the landscape of all that has been and all that will be. It’s both a sacred form of communication, and a noa way to practise being ourselves and communicating honestly and safely.
When the dirt started speaking to me, I felt scared. But in that fear, I felt lucky. I felt privileged to be spoken to. But was this all an amazing spiritual experience? No, not exactly. There were symptoms of this state of being that did not feel like privileges. I’m not going to reexamine them here, because they belong to me. But I am going to list them to show you what it’s like to be a whole person within this space, so that you don’t just take the matekite elements away from the parts of the illness that really do feel like they are a dis-ease, or dis-order. Hypersexuality is embarrassing and not fun, hearing things while you are working on a theatre show and need to listen for cues is not fun, having up to seven trains of thought / overlapping voices in your head is (you guessed it) not fun, wanting to fight everything and everyone is also, not fun. Struggling to sleep for more than three hours a night is debilitating, and not fun. But somehow the least fun part, was the strong message to hurt myself, and to do it by using the dirt, by creating something dark and evil from my body, and the body of the land. But as you already know, I didn’t do that. I slowed down. I thought about what my ancestors would actually want me to do, what the actual message was. And once I’d figured it out, I set down to work.
This is a story about dirt
This is a story about one of your tīpuna
She had many names across her lifetime
One of those names was Hinepūnui
This is a name you share
Another one of her names
Was Hine Ahuone
Wahine of the soil
What is she telling you?
What is it you need?
Me mahi tāua,
It is time you worked together
To create
To birth
The antipsychiatry movement has surprisingly been a huge problem within my life these last few years. As Māori, if I say I have bipolar disorder, or that I am on medication, my right to exist is suddenly up for debate. People will cry over how colonised I am. They will tell me I need te reo and tikanga (which ironically, I have not been able to learn or follow while I am experiencing the incredibly dangerous psychological distress of not being medicated) and that medication is the colonisers poison. It hurts to think of the amount of times I have had young Māori in distress talk to me about resisting medication because they have been told that it will tarnish their relationship with their matekitetanga. When I speak with my tuakana in the bipolar / whaiarorua space, we speak differently. We joke that if we’d been given enough time, our tīpuna would have discovered that when they drank from a certain spring, they felt more even, less afraid,and less haunted by the negative aspects of this way of being. They felt in control, rather than controlled by the symptoms. They felt open to the blessings, and understood the risks of the coin’s opposite side. My tīpuna would have found the lithium spring. I have no doubt. I take my medication every day, even when I don’t want to. I spent a lot of this episode, not wanting to. I take my medication even when someone is screaming and crying over me at a wānanga because me being able to exist in the space I do as someone with lived experience, feels like a threat to them.
This is a story about dirt
This is a story about the music that comes from it
But you have to have the space in your mind to listen for the oro
You have to have the space to step back and see the full picture
To see the intention of your tipuna
To extract it from the web of the illness
This is a story about dirt
This is a story about oro
This is a story about how when we have enough space in our minds
We can hear our ancestors speak clearly
We can follow their wishes
Their plans to dig us out of this mess
One taonga at a time
Because I was medicated, this episode played out differently. I had sleeping pills which meant that I DID get three hours sleep a night, without them, I would have had none at all. Because I was medicated, I didn’t get so lost in the spaces between all the worlds I inhabit. I ate, I slept (somewhat), I drank water, I communicated clearly, I managed to work (not ideal but necessary), and most importantly, I could zoom out enough to understand the message from my tīpuna. She didn’t want me to hurt myself, she didn’t want me to craft a creature... she wanted me to sing the soil into the world, she wanted us to work together so that I could get what I needed. She wanted me to work with her so we could both survive.
And so, with a bucket full of Kāi Tahu soil, I started making the first pūtangitangi that would become part of my exhibition, ‘(Pū)oro’. Over the next few months I would make 248 pūtangitangi; round instruments traditionally made of clay, that help to hold and support our emotions. That make the sound of tangihotuhotu, the deep crying of morning. I made them in all different styles, some with wheku-faces to look like the original image of the clay child my brain had thrown me to decipher. I made them around the clock for months. But I still slept, I still ate, I still functioned. I talked and worked with my tīpuna, but was able to maintain the present world relationships I had with my family and closest friends. Medication isn’t for everybody, and I am so proud of my friends who are in remission and no longer need it till live safe, full, and happy lives. I acknowledge too that our people have been overmedicated for their spiritual gifts in the past, before we understood the huge variation of our mental and spiritual landscape as Māori. An important presence for me in this space was tohunga Wiremu Niania, who puts the safety of each tangata whaiora first, while still acknowledging that their ways of being fit within both our worlds. By accessing all of what we have to help and hold us, we can work to ensure that people like me are no longer taken advantage of. We can ensure that Māori in this space, keep their rangatiratanga. For me, having medication during this time meant that I was able to live in both worlds, to follow both paths. He wahine whai arorua ahau.
This is a story about dirt
It is a story of 248 taonga made through your hands
It is a story about an ancestor
And about how sometimes you change your name to fit a new temporary life
It is a story about mana
It is a story about rangatiratanga
It is a story of how you survived so well
That you were able to thrive with your tīpunas name upon you
With your tīpuna’s soil under your nails
At the start of 2024, I completed my PhD in public health looking at the use of taonga pūoro in hauora. I thought I was done, but then it became clear that I needed to create a book to awhi our whānau with this knowledge that I have been so lucky to receive from our kaumātua and tuakana in these spaces. Many of whom, like me, have lived experiences of the kinds of health concerns that they have worked to support and treat. But sadly, I haven’t been able to acquire any funding to do this. But my tīpuna have plans, they see the ara even when I can’t. And so, together we’ve put together an exhibition to get me the space to write this book, to give it back to the communities who helped to build and hold all of this knowledge. Because my ancestors have got my back, and my medication gives me the ability to be able to stop, think, and listen. And at the end of the day being listened to, is all my ancestors have really asked for. So now we invite you, to come and listen to all of us. Pūoro atu, pūoro mai.
‘(Pū)oro’ is open from the 15th to the 17th of November at Urban Dream Brokerage at 19 Tory Street. Pūtangitangi and prints are available to purchase online at www.puoroexhibition.com as well as an album soundtrack and making / mātauranga guide which is available for koha.