Mending the Kupenga

Anchored by her Taranaki Māori and Scottish/Irish Pākehā whakapapa, Arielle investigates how weaving practices might, over time, offer pathways towards repairing familial disconnections and ruptures embedded in settler-colonial amnesia and dislocation. Looking to the pūtahi — considered as moments of encounter and exchange, and intersections of materials and practices across cross-cultural lines — this research advocates for the revival, sustenance, and continued innovation of ancestral practices.

Working with whakapapa, whatuora, and storywork as methodologies, Mending the Kupenga utilises place-based material gathering, poetic storytelling, and fibre craft processes in order to (re)weave connections to place. Comprised of body-scale “whatu-weavings” through an extended, ongoing series of tauira (samplers), Arielle’s artworks blend whatu, weaving, and lacemaking textile-craft techniques on hand-crafted warp-weighted looms. 

Revealed in the materially-crafted elements of the project, this doctoral research established new methods of combining whatu and weaving, muka and wool together, utilising the warp-weighted loom structure. Embracing the pūtahi (moments of convergence and exchange) and the likelihood of incurring tension as a form of engagement has opened a dialogue between materials, time-spaces, and lines of whakapapa. The research finds its significance in developing an art practice centred in place and relations, grown through conversation and observation, and always with the intent to unpick and re-weave, reclaim and restore, towards a more reciprocal future.