I am an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is shaped by the braided lines of my whakapapa: Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Raukawa, and Scottish McMillan ancestry. Working from and with my ancestral home of Matakana Island, I use whenua, woollen blankets, muka, tukutuku structures, and taonga pūoro to explore how whakapapa lives, breathes, and acts through material form.

Whenua sits at the centre of everything I make. Gathered through tikanga and deep relational listening, it becomes pigment, binding agent, collaborator, and teacher. In works such as He Kupu Te Whenua, the land speaks politically—its cut edges declaring Toitū te Tiriti. In others, I press woollen blankets into sandstone boulders below my whānau urupā, allowing the island to impress its contours into the fibres. These whenua-soaked surfaces carry grief, memory, and the resilience of a land still speaking back.

My sculptural installations explore whakapapa as a temporal and spatial continuum. In works like Toroa and Ngā Porowhita ō te Marae, I stitch whenua-dyed wool with muka to form ladders, pathways, porowhita, and suspended weavings that mirror the spatial grammar of the marae. Viewers walk through these forms as they would through generations—through the folding temporalities of Onamata, Anamata, where past and future breathe within the same moment.

Sound is another vital strand of my practice. Shaping taonga pūoro from Matakana uku, I explore the whakapapa of breath, vibration, and voice. Sometimes the instrument sings; sometimes it refuses. Those refusals, too, are part of the work—reminders that sovereignty vibrates, resists, and asserts itself through more than words.

My hybrid whakapapa guides the aesthetic language of the work. Woollen blankets—objects of colonial exchange—meet muka and whenua. Argyle echoes appear alongside tukutuku patterns. Rather than resolving these tensions, I treat them as generative spaces where new genealogies can emerge.

Ultimately, my practice creates pathways rather than platforms: spaces where whenua, fibre, sound, and viewer meet in relation. Through these materials, I honour the ongoing agency of the land, the breath of tīpuna and mokopuna, and the unfolding of Māori futurisms rooted in sovereignty and care.