Hei Tupa

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

The jewellery maker Areta Wilkinson has whakapapa, or genealogical connections, to Te Waipounamu (the South Island) through Ngāti Irakehu, Te Hapū o Ngāti Wheke and Ngāi Tūāhuriri. ‘Jewellery as pepeha’ became a central tenet of her doctoral study, completed in 2014.

‘Pepeha’ is both a verb and a noun that refers to the act of exclaiming or being the subject of a statement. It connotes a tribal saying, motto or metaphoric proverb that encapsulates certain Māori values and human characteristics. For Wilkinson, ‘jewellery as pepeha’ became a personal story of engagement with taoka tuku iho, or Te Waipounamu cultural treasures, embedding her sense of belonging to place or tūrangawaewae. Her new work drew on Māori methods of inquiry and was firmly based in the Ngāi Tahu world view.

Wilkinson is no stranger to seeking impetus and inspiration from museum collections. Her Hei tupa necklace is based on rarely exhibited shell adornments from Te Papa’s collection. It also emerged from a co-devised practice that she and her husband, photographer Mark Adams, developed as part of her research into taoka tūturu (cultural treasures) from Te Waipounamu. Wilkinson and Adams investigated major museum collections, including many in the South Island, and worked mainly with early taoka — those made between ad 1200 and 1500 — to ‘cast light into an area full of potential’.1

The light they cast was literal: they recorded taoka with blueprints or photograms as one-off analogue images, negative silhouettes that record the space around an object. No camera is required to lay a taoka tūturu on photosensitive paper and expose it to light, and there are no negatives, so the act records a taoka at a particular time. The resulting image is a ‘memory or shadow remaining on the paper, liminal and potent’, an ‘image unseen … a trace of a taoka’.2 From this shadow or trace, the form recorded in the photogram may then be transformed into oxidised sterling silver and suspended on polyester thread, to be worn as a taonga for future generations.

Huhana Smith