In explaining yet again, talking it through with yet another new person today, I delved more thoroughly into the many motives for wanting to study people who relocate to NZ. Putting into words, with hesitancy yet an increasing excitement too, I returned to another strand in the woven ropes of my self-directed passion for migrants and relocation.
Tivaevae was the original subject years ago during research for an art history paper that first sparked my interest in investigating the meanings imbued into the art forms that mirgrate along with their creators.
In choosing tivaevae, I was myself looking for meanings from my own heritage; a Tahitian grandmother whose handmade tivaevae quilts, so colourful, so practical, had adorned the beds and sofas of her home. And now mine.
I found through my research how these representative crafts of traditional polynesian origin, were being recreating to signify and represent new or transitional identities; symbols both of a lost homeland and a newfound home.
It seemed Cook Island women were and are still appliqueing motifs of nature, as is fitting for a traditional polynesian women's craft, but that living in NZ meant the motifs were needing represent and reflect a new environment; its plants and animals, its fish and flowers. New identities were created and reassured through such representation- new visuals clues to a heritage based on older, established wisdoms.
Not only were motifs new, but the uses for these quilted materials was altered- traditional ceremonies and occasions were changing with hte hybridity of a NZ-Cook Is mix present in the 1st generation... Different needs determined different ways of gift giving; practical needs of warmth for example (not an issue in the heat of tropical climes) being met with these padded fabric artforms.
Today not only did I recover a sense of connection to the visual aspects of relocation identity, but rummaging through old treasure boxes while making notes for a 21st speech I found interview notes with an old friend Lyn, an amateur artist and sometime tivaevae maker. Of Danish, not Pasifika heritage, she is 1st generation NZer, and felt drawn to tivaevae initially by its 'exotic' appeal. Having sewn American styled tiny patchwork squares as a child she was not daunted by the new technical challenges. She wanted to make a hybrid piece of 'home decoration, and make it her own.
She imposed a certain European flavour on her design, sticking to a red and white theme- the Danish colours dominated her design. These hot colours also spoke to her of the NZ tropical heat in which she feels at home. Working with a lighter fabric compared to the heavy, somewhat impractical nature of layers of traditional patchworking appealed to her as being far more user friendly in an era of machine washing...
And like a Cook Is family intended to give her finished product as a wedding present to her sister. An extension of a new homeland, a memento that creates, than than reminds one of where home is now.
So I have had a day of insights, past visions returning to reassure me I'm still on a path that seems true enough to myself. I am reassured my recent mental wandering off into the silent shrubbery alongside the path have not been in vain...
there's a method yet and I'm ending the year with a positive note to stay tuned, to stay energised, grateful and alert to all the twists and turns of this wonderful life!
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I read of this and thought of your blog given the themes of how home is chosen, shaped and left..., This beautiful but fierce story of the sahel as told by Paul Salopek April 2008 in National Geographic:
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They were planting sorghum in a dry wadi.
The women’s work appeared rudderless. They planted their seeds in lines that wriggled across the field, nudged here and there by whims of conversation. The older woman swerved whenever she told jokes, and her seed rows lurched like cardiograms. She giggled into her hands often, and I decided she must be mad. The younger one was more solemn. She toiled briskly, with a sense of purpose, as if engaged in a race, and her planting was much straighter. A tiny child crawled at her side, trying to eat the seed grain. The women labored like this all day. Then, late in the afternoon, they quarreled, and their plantings veered apart in rancor.
It occurred to me that the women were doing more than growing food. They were sowing their autobiographies.
Sex jokes, village gossip, little wisps of song, rebukes to children—all of it lay scribbled in the eccentric lines of their crops.
Women have been singled out.... These stories, too, would be recorded in their fields... I imagined flying low over the savannas of Darfur and reading the women’s lives inscribed in plots of millet, peanuts, and sorghum. (See that row of melons ending abruptly at midfield? A Fur grandmother dropped her seed bucket and ran at the sound of approaching hoofbeats.)
Such is the evidence of relocation and evolution on a landscape. The shaping both planned and unplanned.
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