Muka creation takes the stage

It's been a busy year for Turangi fibre artist Bonnie Marshall.
It was topped off recently when a young Rotorua woman modelling one of Bonnie's stunning muka dresses took out the runner-up place in the recent Miss Aotearoa competition in Papakura, Auckland.
Kristina Warmington wore Bonnie's muka garment "Amiria" in the traditional-wear section of the contest, teaming the cream and burgundy dress with a harakeke, flowers and feathers headpiece she made herself.
Muka is a lustrous cream-coloured fibre which is extracted from harakeke (flax) by a labour-intensive process of harvesting, stripping and pounding before it is woven into a thread. Muka threads and muka yarn are then woven and sewn together in a process known as whatu, which creates a muka fabric.
It can take two to three weeks of intensive effort to create a muka garment, which does not include the preparation time.
The Miss Aotearoa competition was not the first outing for the dress, which was also shown at the Toi Ake Tuwharetoa festival in Turangi and other events in the past.
Bonnie says Kristina contacted her via her aunt, Hinemoa Wanikau, and came to Turangi to try on three of Bonnie's muka creations.
"She rang Hinemoa and asked if it was possible to bring her to meet me and I said 'yes by all means', and I said I'm honoured that someone should wear it on the catwalk in that sort of parade."
Amiria, along with several other of Bonnie's muka garments, were also brought out earlier this year for Waitahanui Bilingual School's Matariki celebrations and her garments made a showing at the Korohe Marae centenary celebrations, where they were modelled by mokopuna from the marae.
Bonnie attended the Miss Aotearoa show and said she was rapt to see Kristina named runner-up.
The honour came on top of a busy year for Bonnie. She has been commissioned to create her first muka korowai for a local family and her other project includes reworking her five-piece muka and pheasant-feather wearable artwork Parekaawa as a dress.
Bonnie is also kept occupied passing on the skill of muka. She is regularly asked to teach around the Tuwharetoa rohe, including wananga this year at Hirangi Marae and two weekend workshops at Hatepe. So far, she has taught her students the art of muka but next she plans to move on to making kakahu (capes) with feathers.
She attended the Indigenous Weavers' International Symposium in Rotorua earlier this year, where she intended to learn to make coloured kete, but instead found herself teaching other artists how to make and weave muka.
She says it is part of a resurgence of interest in traditional Maori arts and crafts, although she sees herself as a designer who uses traditional methods and materials to create contemporary wearable art.