Dr Kirsten Lyttle
Title of work: Kahu Whakaahua 

2022-23
Inkjet prints, cotton

Commissioned and acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

At times, my weaving practice has not sat comfortably with my photography. Afterall, there is a long history of the objectification of Māori and other colonised Indigenous people through the lens of the camera. It is only since the late 1960s that Māori have used to camera to tell our own stories and record our communities and ways of thinking. While contemporary Māori artists and scholars have shown digital technologies are not necessarily a threat to indigenous cultural integrity, it is also true that photography not only recorded Māori weaving practice, but it also actively reshaped it.

Due to photography, decorative tāniko borders of Māori cloaks were moved from the side and bottom borders to the top; effectively presenting these garments upside down. Through my creative practice-lead research and utilizing my methodology - whakaahua (to photograph, to transform) - I argue that the photograph can be “Māorified”; transformed into an indigenous object through employing kaiwhatu (Māori customary weaver) techniques. So that the photograph becomes both a site and a material for making customary Māori artworks such as a kahu huruhuru (feather cloak).

This project continues the work from my PhD creative research (award granted in 2020). For Melbourne Now 2023, I have made a photographic cloak based on my previous work Gundulu/Emu Kākahuhuruhuru, 2018-2019. 

Kahu Whakaahua involves a complex process of construction. It originated firstly as a handwoven cloak of emu, goose and pheasant feathers. That cloak was then photographed, and the 459 photographs were then meticulously woven using customary Māori weaving techniques to create this new cloak, constructed at the exact scale of a traditional customary garment.