 inga mana, inga reo, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa miunga mihi nui kia koutou, kātika, ki te kaupapa o tērā nei, ae, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tātou katoa. Kia ora everybody. I've just made a brief greeting in Te Reo Māori which is the indigenous language of my home. I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the Tāngata whenua or the original people of this land. Sadly, I don't know who the original American Indian tribe is of this New York region, but I would welcome these ancestors and thank you all for being here this morning to hear me talk. And this talk and this exhibition is made possible by the Elizabeth Sackler Centre and I'd like to thank the staff and volunteers who've been doing a marvellous job in looking after a group of women. I call it the Estrogen Rising Team, so thank you very much. I'd like to start this presentation with the image of Mahauika, which is in this particular exhibition, Global Feminisms, and we've been asked to give a context to our work and I would like to talk about what this work is about in terms of an architectural sense. Within this exhibition, Mahauika looks like a portrait, but in fact it's my replication of representing an ancestor. Generally, our ancestors would be carved in wood and you can see some examples of that in the Pacific exhibition, the Pacific area in the Brooklyn Museum. And just while I'm talking about the Pacific collection, a couple of people have been asking me what I'm wearing around my neck and this is a very contemporary version of a haitiki. And downstairs there's a very, very beautiful haitiki in one of the cabinets. It's a Nephrite or Ponamu, it's our New Zealand jade. Every image that's down there is of somebody, always of an ancestor. So Mahauika sits on a stool. She's talked about as being part of the underworld and in my vision of her, I've kind of contemporised what this underworld is. Often she's presented in a sort of a natural native setting of New Zealand bush, but my Mahauika sits on a Marseille Brewer chair. Pleased to say that there's two original Marseille Brewer chairs on show, also in the Brooklyn Museum. I've always quite often travelled around the world and that's such a design icon you see it in many, many buildings and museums and art galleries around the world. So I wanted to update my version of my Maori goddess by presenting her in this century in 2007 thinking about what does she look like? What does she mean and what does she say? Mahauika is the fire goddess. There's a story of her grandson Maui, who's a trickster figure, who goes to meet her and ask her for her fingernails because contained within each fingernail on her hands is fire. The trickster figure is always a naughty person. So when Maui went down to see Mahauika, he asked her for her fingernail and she holds it up. It's almost like a beckoning. It's the first time that she's seen him. She sniffs him out. She can smell him in her presence and asks him what he's after and he asks for a fingernail because they've ran out of fire on Earth. She plucks out her fingernail and each time he leaves her, he throws them down into a river that he's walking past until the very last fingernail is her little fingernail and in a rage. After giving her Maui nine of her fingernails, she plucks out the last one and throws it at him. She throws it into the bush and Maui has to turn into a bird to flee the fire and the heat from this rage that she has beset upon him. One of the stories behind this myth of Mahauika and Maui is there's the Mahaui tree. There's one tree in New Zealand that you can rub together and through that you can make sparks and create fire. I'd like to acknowledge Fiona Foley who's sitting in the audience now and just in terms of setting up a difference, people can never quite tell the difference between New Zealanders and Australians with their accents and the place. They are very, very different spaces. For instance, my knowledge is aboriginal people. They create fire by rubbing downwards whereas with Maui, we build a canal and kind of make very, very fast to create these sparks. So fire is really important because it brings more, it feeds us and we need it for the community. So communities are very, very important in New Zealand. And Mahauika is just one ancestor in a suite of works called Digital Morai. So this is not a portrait. This is a representative image of a form that would be held within a Whare Nui. And a Whare Nui is probably quite akin architecturally to the Longhouse which you see in Canadian Indian architecture. And within these kinds of spaces is where we gather to spend time together to debate, to laugh, to cry, to sing, to share information and knowledge. This is Hiniwai who is very young in comparison to Mahauika. Mahauika, I'll just take that slide back because I did want to say a little something about the model. This is my father's elder sister, Rongel, and she passed away last year. So this work has gained in a different kind of significance photographically because it becomes a memento. But also this image particularly means a lot to me because it's a familial image and she was the first image in the series of Digital Morai. So I felt like I had to anchor the series of works with an older person. And with Hiniwai who comes next, this is kind of much more futuristic and moving into another direction. Hiniwai is the youngest sister of Hinipukohurangi. I don't have the image on my PowerPoint presentation, but it is available on the website, the Global Feminisms website. And again this is about family ties and the care between sisters and looking across generations. I suppose my work in terms of thinking about this notion of feminism, these particular works, their provocation lies in the fact that most morai are carved and made by men. So in using photography and the computer as my carving tool, I am able as a woman to navigate my way through an area that would usually be done by men. It's quite a provocative thing to do. And I think that within this larger exhibition the sense of how this work sits is quite different because you're seeing one image from a series of five. At present I'm working on a series of male portraits and I'm also working on a series of takatapoi portraits. Now takatapoi is a Māori term that very loosely translates to transgender or friends, very, very close friends of the same sex. It has quite a different sense how we might understand it in the Western terminology, but for me a Māai morai, a Māai place for my community, it's really important that it's inclusive and that all people feel welcome and there's a place for everybody inside the house. Basically what these photographs are, are a series of building blocks and in the year 2020, I'm slowly creating the various architectural forms to put these together. Well really I'm on my three minutes up. Ah, so fast. And to take this back, I suppose before I began the series of portraits I had to make works that are based on textiles. These are some dresses, some fabulous 1970s dresses that I wore a few years ago now, which I've filmed and videoed and recombined into grid-like forms, grid-like structures, so that they reference Māori weaving called tukutuku. They act as panels, so what you need to do is imagine these portraits actually sit between each of these panels. When my marae is put together it's an incredibly symbolic and decorated space that is created. It's been a life work and I've been moving towards that for probably the last six or seven years and I've given myself a lot of time because I like to move very slowly. And I also feel it's important not to just put lots and lots of work out in the world. I like that each work has a reason for being. I think there's a lot of stuff in the world and what I want to put in there I feel very strong about that it's worthy to be seen. I'm just going to quickly, because I've run out of time, show you a work called The Colour of Sin and I'm just showing this because my mother was a hairdresser in Hillsborough many, many years ago and I had wanted to make this work for a very long time. I do a lot of installation and I work with film and video and sound and this is an opening where three of my girlfriends are sitting inside these crazy retro, raunter hairdryers and they're really beautiful sound domes and I have a piece of sound that you can hear what plays inside them on the website. So I invite you to look at that at some time and I should round this up for a few minutes of fame. It was really fast 15 minutes is not quite enough I think warhol meant 15 hours perhaps, something like that. Anyway thank you very much for listening to my talk.