Whirikoka's story

FROM BACKDROP TO MURAL: Panels that made up a backdrop designed by artist Lina Marsh and developed by Makaraka School arts teacher Michelle Hall and students could be opened and closed to create entrances and exits for a school production. The backdrop also works as a stand-alone piece that will later be hung as a mural. Picture supplied

A brightly coloured backdrop designed by artist Lina Marsh for a school production presented a visual narrative of the dance/drama The Story of Whirikoka.

Makaraka School students enacted the story in which Whirikoka and his seal are drawn to Mangataikapua Stream near Whatatutu. They are joined by river creatures from the Waipaoa but play so much they fail to head back to sea before sunrise. When the sun beams down on them they are trapped on Mangataikapua. They tear at their blubber and turn into oil and Whirikoka loses his beloved friend. The story is said to illustrate presence of oil in the area.

From left to right, the backdrop depicts Whirikoka with his arm around his seal, pou-like kaitiaki, each atop a small cloud, and a sun motif in each panel to suggest the star’s progress from east to west. A stylised moon set off-centre casts a broadening beam across the water and down the picture plane. The half-seen outlines of Whirikoka and his seal glide underwater with turtles, octopuses, dolphin, stingray and an eel up the moonlit “pathway” to Mangataikapua.

Poignancy

On the far right we see Whirikoka, hands braced on his knees as he sobs over the threshing water.

“The backdrop matched the performance,” says the school’s arts teacher Michelle Hall.

“The board tells the story.”

Creation of the artwork involved a sophisticated process that included projection, magnification, abstraction, digital technology and much student engagement. Marsh first drew up a schematic plan that was to include elements such as night sky, landscape, sea, marine and river creatures. Each student chose a pattern from a marine creature, drew the pattern then selected a single element from the design. That element was scanned into kaleidoscope software to create symmetrical pattern that was traced onto cardboard then cut out to create a stencil. The next step was to disassociate the pattern from its provenance and decide if the stencilled design was to represent a sky, marine or river motif.

“This was a collective decision over whether a pattern looked like a star or a kina,” says Hall.

“The student had to decide if their pattern was from the river or sea then Lina incorporated them in the artwork.”

Recurrent motifs

Roller painted onto the backdrop, the symmetrical stencil patterns are reminiscent of the recurrent, doily-like motif Marsh has included in her Childers Road and Bright Street murals. Marsh stencilled students’ drawings of sea and river creatures onto the work. She sponged paint onto feathers and printed them onto the moonbeam panel to suggest birds that live around the river.

The sun “discs” on each of the backdrops flanking panels are also stencil patterns. A sun appears in each panel as it sinks under an increasingly turbid night sky. The broody and luminous sky is a feature common to Marsh’s Childers Road and Bright Street murals as is a motif of coloured vertical lines. These appear in the backdrop as ancestral kaitiaki atop pou each of which stands on a cloud.

Although it wasn’t the artist’s intention the fractured planes that make up the pictorial surface suggest sheared and displaced rock strata. Incoming swells hit by light, but with deeper shades in the troughs, were the inspiration to use horizontal bands in green and blue. The broken and diagonal lines are intended to direct the eye to the moon above the mountain range.

Life is life

Marsh also looked at early Pacific and Maori carving and used block-like forms for the figures of Whirikoka and his tragic seal on the left hand side of the work.

Given the poignancy of the story, students wrote their own stories about how life can be happy and sad at the same time, says Hall.

“One student said the story of Whirikoka didn’t have a happy ending, but it was a satisfying ending because it gives a meaning to life.”