Wairoa Museum's new exhibition U Mai Ko Te Taniwha. Photo / Supplied
Wairoa Museum's new exhibition U Mai Ko Te Taniwha. Photo / Supplied
Past and present flow seamlessly in a new exhibition at Wairoa Museum that combines ancient knowledge, a lifetime of scholarship and adapts technologies spanning three centuries.
Ū Mai Ko Te Taniwha is a collaboration between a Wairoa and Te Reinga storyteller Richard Niania (Ngai Kohatu) and photographer and academic Dr Joyce Campbell.
Campbell from Auckland University grew up in Ruakituri and has teamed up Niania who has researched the whakapapa of tipuna and the water flowing through and around Whakapunake.
Ū Mai Ko Te Taniwha follows a previous exhibition in Wairoa to look at purākau - telling the stories of the largest catchment in Hawke’s Bay - of Maui, his topknot and fishhook which was his grandmother’s jawbone, hauling up the sacred maunga Whakapunake and te ika a Maui, the North Island.
Moa bones deep inside Whakapunake with its five internal waterways and tomo and the mysteries of the Hangaroa and Ruakituri currents meeting at Te Reinga, and the race between taniwha Hinekorako and Ruamano are among the purākau overflowing the gallery walls.
Campbell, using her knowledge of historic cameras, built a gigantic 20x24 camera to capture images of the wahi tipuna referenced in local purākau, Niania retells.
Without those purākau and his deep scholarship, Campbell said the images would just be landscapes.
The gallery also has prints of images created in a process she likened to screen-printing where she began with a scanning of the canyon using liDAR technology and then through photogravure, etched the images using layers of dye after immersing herself in the three-dimensional liDar image.
From left: Dr Joyce Campbell, Richard Niania and Wairoa Museum director Clare Butler. Photo / Supplied
Dodging April showers, pulling the equipment in and out of the car, and then back to her Auckland shed, she and her son and university colleagues found a way of turning a liDAR image into something that could be printed in a large black and white format capturing the spirit of the Te Reinga purākau assembled by Niania.
As a photographer, she said it was the first time she had used the print-making process as an art form and a “hybridisation of that process”.
It proved a process of layering and has its own backstory.
Wairoa Museum's new exhibition U Mai Ko Te Taniwha. Photo / Supplied
Civil engineers, geologists and local groups - Project Rangatahi and the Wairoa River restoration group - intersected the mission using local flax fibre to make the paper for the print-making process using a leather press.
Rawiri Hammond-Edwards and Amber Hammond were at the opening with their big books and Campbell’s evocative images.
Looking at one of the purākau of the Wairoa River, river restoration group’s Katarina Kawana said: “That is so us, so Wairoa.”
For Wairoa Museum’s new director Clare Butler, taking over from Angie Smith and former director Mike Spedding, and barely a month into her new role, Ū Mai Ko Te Taniwha was a day of riches.
She saw the show as the connection between the taniwha, the whenua, and the people.
“We are so fortunate that Matua [Niania] has shared this deep knowledge and Joyce has caught aspects of it in her images… there are so many taniwha in this rohe.”
The museum has six weeks of lunchtime talks each Wednesday featuring speakers related to the whenua.
Niania will continue his korero tomorrow at 12pm at the museum gallery, perhaps with more tales of paramount chief of Turanganui, Ruapani and his trail of wananga up and down the coast or Takitimu journeying from Hawaiki to Wairoa, conveying its sacred knowledge safely to a new home.
