Category: Uncategorized

Views from the sea

Rakiura

The artist featured in the exhibition Encountering Aotearoa at the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū is Cora-Allan Lafaiki-Twiss (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Tumutumu, Nuie – Liku, Alofi). I am fascinated by her work. She went by boat around Aotearoa to look at the land and sea. In part, this was to see the land as the crew of the Endeavour might have seen it – with Tupaia and his assistant Taiata on board – as they circumnavigated and mapped the land. Cora-Allan asked her pāpā, Kelly Lafaiki (Nuie – Liku, Alofi) to accompany her as assistant on the journey. Videos screen on a wall, documenting the journey and the making of the work.

Frames around many of the paintings remind me of boat windows with their rounded edges and toughened glass. The artist uses hiapo, traditional mulberry bark paper often known as tapa cloth. It was soaked in sea water in each place a work was created. I looked at the back of the hanging paintings and could see where the sheets of paper had been joined and I could appreciate its texture and thickness.

Hiapo, mulberry bark paper, is used for the art works

The pigments used are from the whenua (land). So the making of the work is as fascinating as the paintings themselves. In a glass case, are some sketchbooks and a marvellous wooden toolkit which folds out, with a sliding drawer in the base and a leather handle. This would have been ideal when working from a boat.

A panoramic sea view on panels stretches across the gallery space on a wooden frame.

In the entrance to the exhibition, these islands seem to float on the grey/blue background.

Large hanging paintings lead you further in. The details are intricate and significant, with traditional and contemporary elements, and the photos don’t do them justice.

Maunga (mountain), Moana (sea), Whenua (land) and Waka (boat)

I look forward to visiting the exhibition again.

Post Script: I particularly liked the painting Rakiura. Later, I realised I was wearing a Glowing Sky jersey which seemed appropriate being a brand named for Rakiura (Stewart Island) with its views of the southern lights or aurora australis.

Top to toe

Looking after Mum today included a haircut and a pedicure. We found The Palms mall very convenient for both of these without booking in advance. Today we returned the bath board to Burwood Hospital – another step in the recovery process. We had hoped the hairdresser at Burwood (‘Walk-ins Welcome’) could cut Mum’s hair, but no luck, hence the choice of the mall which was on the way home. It was a good choice: there was only a brief wait for the haircut and, as we’ve struggled to find someone to ‘do the toes’, were pleased to discover a few nail places to choose from at the mall, and no waiting. Mum sat in a massage chair with her feet in a little spa bath, then her nails were cut and her toes buffed, oiled, massaged and moisturised.

The outing was an opportunity for Mum to get some walking exercise. She managed well with just her stick and it helped that we were able to find a mobility park close to the entrance of the mall. At home, her walker is often parked somewhere and she is able to walk about independently.

I enjoyed choosing some cuddly flannelette sheets for Mum a couple of weeks ago to keep her warm on these cool autumn nights. The temperature was forecast to drop to 2 degrees last night, so I put the new sheets on the bed yesterday. She found them very cosy. Aren’t they just the ticket!

Darn it

I like to darn clothes, particularly woollen socks and jerseys, if they develop holes. Fine merino garments are a bit more of a challenge. Wool is too thick, so I use cotton – or polyester thread (cotton thread is no longer available as far as I know) and a fine needle. This morning I darned a favourite fine merino top which, like many of my tops, had holes at the front above the hem. I wonder if these holes are caused by leaning on the kitchen bench. I’m trying to break that habit.

My darning is a bit clumsy, but satisfying to do. I do the horizontal threads first and then weave in and out vertically – the weft and warp. I’m reminded of the women weavers in a book I just finished called Unquiet Women by Max Adams. He writes of the huge weaving production barns in medieval times, often attached to country houses, where women sat in lines at many looms working long, hard hours. The making of linen was particularly demanding as the rendering of the flax into fibres for weaving was an exhausting and dirty job. The author quotes a woman’s will in which she carefully details items of clothing to be passed on to her surviving family members. It’s clear that clothing was well made and highly valued.

I am also reminded of the women I saw in Peru and Bolivia, spinning with drop spindles as they watched flocks of sheep and alpaca. Then would follow the dyeing and weaving and the cloth could be seen in the clothes they wore and at markets for sale. The cloth on these spoon dolls is faded (I’ve had them for over 40 years), but the female figure on the left is holding a drop spindle.

In a small way, my darning is part of a long tradition.

Felix at 18 months

Looking at Felix tonight I can see how much he has grown. He is almost too big for the chair.

In February last year, at 4 months old, he was a tidier fit.

But by April last year, at 6 months old, he seemed to have had a growth spurt.

I just did a bit of quick research and learned from several sources that (with the exception of some breeds) cats stop growing at about 12 to 18 months of age. So the chair might do for a while yet.

Mine – or ours?

Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine!

Seagulls in Finding Nemo
Felix took ‘my’ chair this morning

Why is it that a cat ‘steals’ the chair where, just moments before, you were happily reading the paper? Could it be the warmth? Is it territorial (mine!)? Or proprietorial (who’s the boss)? Or just canny (she likes that chair so it must be the place to be)?

It reminds me of Finnick the cat making himself comfortable on the bed of Cosmo the dog. At the time I was babysitting, or maybe cat-sitting, at my sister’s family’s house for a few days and had taken Cosmo and his bed with me. This bolshie border terrier decided he was no match for Finnick, and opted for the passive aggressive. By some instinct, he went directly upstairs, in an unfamiliar house, where I found him some time later squeezed into Finnick’s bed and looking rather hard done by.

Finnick on Cosmo’s sheepskin in July 2015
Cosmo in (sort of) Finnick’s bed, July 2015
Finnick was still at it in 2018 – this is clearly a dog’s bed!

While I was searching out these photos, I found other examples of this territorial (if that’s what it is) behaviour. Perhaps it’s just about sharing.

There’s a whole sofa, but this end is best (Cosmo and Skipper) April 2012
This bit of the mat is best shared (Cosmo and Jock) – but we’re not making eye contact. Jan 2017
Just keeping it warm for you… July 2015

To this day, Finnick remains a ‘first in, first served’ cat. He snaffles Mum’s knee when we visit, even while she’s sitting down in the hallway to take off her shoes. Then, once she’s settled on the sofa, Finnick’s there. Koda just has to make do.

Nov. 2021

Wombat adventures

As I picked up my paper at my gate this morning, a woman walking her children to school came over to thank me for the books I’d given them a couple of weeks ago. She said her daughter particularly liked the one written by the same author who wrote the wombat books. “I’ve got those books,” I said. “So have we,” she replied.

The wombat books are by Jackie French, beautifully illustrated by Bruce Whatley, and are based on the true story of Mothball the wombat who takes up residence in a backyard. Imagine having a wombat battering down your back door demanding carrots! In the second book, the residents’ toddler befriends a baby wombat.

from Diary of a Wombat by Jackie French, illustrated by Bruce Whatley
from Diary of a Baby Wombat

I am pretty sure I bought the first wombat book in Australia. My trip to Adelaide and Melbourne was in September-October 2003. The book was published in 2002, so it is likely I did. I definitely bought the plush toy wombat there. It sits on the top of my computer screen.

I looked out my travel journal. I found myself immersed in it and read the whole thing.

I have a couple of shelves for my travel photos and journals. As you can see, I have bought plush toys from other countries as well. The homemade red and black albums on the top are of the 1981 OE (from South America to Europe to Canada), the yellow albums are of China Dec 87-Jan 88. The most recent journal is of Scandinavia, France and Portugal 2018 – the albums are digital; some are on this blog – in fact, that 2018 trip was why I started blogging, not intending to carry on afterward! Every now and again, I will get out a journal and relive the experience.

I sat reading in my egg chair today, watching the occasional plane flying high overhead and wondering why so many people choose to fly. The book I was reading was set in Sweden. Before I knew it, I was reading that journal…

Kind

A pile of library books is waiting to be read and more are knocking at the door, so to speak, as holds arrive at the library or on Libby. Today, I completed Kind by Stephanie Johnson, the title being a reference to Jacinda Ardern’s plea that we be kind to each other during the pandemic. I was reminded of Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood and Fiona Farrell’s The Deck – both also influenced by political events and by Covid. Kind didn’t fill me with the same sense of entrapment and dread as those books, I was relieved to find. The many flashbacks took you out of claustrophobic lockdown and into complex lives, and out into the countryside too, from Christchurch to Arthur’s Pass to the Bay of Islands to Australia – and even to China in flash back. I was also reminded of Kamila Shamsie’s Best of Friends, as the main part of the story is about the life-long friendship of two women growing in self-knowledge perhaps, or perhaps not.

The cover blurb describes the book as satirical, which it is in a way, but not so the characters become types (with exceptions) rather than credible. Some embody rumours and suspicions which abounded during covid about criminal activity, illegal migration, and Chinese interference or culpability. Many show various ways of being kind and how that can be aspirational but also misguided and possibly lead to choices which cause life-long regret.

In the Author’s Note at the end, the author thanks her husband for ‘a certain plot point’. Which one? There are so many twists and turns. I feared I would lose track of the story lines and characters but they all linked together in increasingly suspenseful ways and soon I was completely into it, reading in my egg chair into the warm evening when it began to rain lightly and got too dark to see. I finished the last couple of pages as I cooked dinner.

On to the next book! Something a little more sedate perhaps, to be kind to myself, before I tackle the brutal demands of more literary fiction.

Oaty Autumn fare

We’re back to New Zealand Standard Time today. It’s dark before you know it. Felix is still running to his own clock, asking for dinner at afternoon tea time. Not really surprising as he had his breakfast at 3am which was when Mum, strangely, got up to have her shower, thinking it was 7am. As the mornings will be lighter for a while, it will be easier for her to tell what time it is.

In the meantime, the garden is producing tomatoes, apples, rhubarb. We’ve begun to have soup again, and oaty puddings and biscuits seem right at this time of year.

Anzac biscuits and Apple and Rhubarb Crumble