Whanau mai te pepi, ka takaia ki te harakeke. Ka noho te harakeke, hei kakahu, hei rongoa, hei mea takaro, hei oranga mona a mate noa ia.

When a baby is born, the child is wrapped in muka cloth made from flax. The flax provides clothing, medicine, toys for play and leisure and means for living and survival in life's journey.

Harakeke in itself comprises a whole body of knowledge in the Maori cultural ethos. This is because the inner fibrous muka of the plant provided the raw material for a multiplicity of traditional Maori activities. Harakeke was ideal for cordage manufacture and weaving as well as having medicinal properties that could be extracted from the gum.

Maori weaving is intrinsically geometric in its expression and perhaps symbolises the geometric ordering of the world between nature and culture. This symmetry is evident in Maori visual art forms from the purely utilitarian to the familiar iconic forms and fantastic figural carvings (whakairo) that express the fundamental Maori/Polynesian cosmology.

The Papahuia artists have taken these traditional forms and motifs and transposed the frieze-like images into a new idiom using the medium of flax paper. It is a labour intensive process to get the coarse muka paper to assume the shape of the carvings while retaining the carvings inherent decorative elements. The artists achieve this difficult transition between media and in so doing creates a hitherto unexplored area of opportunity to experiment with the textures and planes of the muka fibre.

The flax paper glows with the warmth and vitality of the earth itself breathing life into the seminal forms, as if to say "rise and become Tanemahuta, (god of the forest)|; rise and become Hine te Iwaiwa (goddess of weaving and the arts)."

Same old fibre
Brand new weave

Nga Taonga Harakeke

All of these flax paper artworks are hand made. The flax is cut, cooked and blended then made into paper where it goes through a moulding process and finally tiny brushes, acrylic gouache paints and lots of patience are required to bring the images to life. They are then given paua eyes to see.