The art of weaving a community together
A Waitara weaver is excited to be opening her studio for the Taranaki Arts Trail for the first time. Virginia Winder hears her kōrero.
Step into Karen Clark’s studio in Waitara and breathe in the grass-fresh scent of harakeke. Once a billiard room for men only, air thick with cigarette smoke, it’s now a calm place, airy, spacious, and dotted with woven creations of harakeke – kete, artwork and putiputi.
A man is a rare sight here, but always welcome.
Karen has another memory of this space on West Quay by the bridge.
‘‘When I was a teenager, it was a pool parlour and video games.’’
There are still large tables in here, but these are set up like an island in the middle of the room for learners of weaving.
It’s also deeply peaceful, like a chapel, one with Bob Marley music swirling from one corner, a photo of her great-grandmother, Maraea Te Iritawa Taiapa, sitting in another corner.
Here, under her long-time label, KareNZ Kitz, she weaves and, most weekends, runs weaving workshops.
People can see her in action during her first time in the Taranaki Arts Trail, on from October 28 to November 6. Karen will be opening her studio for the whole 10 days, but won’t be running classes.
The annual arts trail is a collaboration with the Centuria Taranaki Garden Festival and the Taranaki Sustainable Backyards Trail, which are running at the same time.
Karen was born in Gisborne, so Hikurangi is her maunga and Ngāti Porou her people.
But she has been living in Taranaki since she was a teenager and has strong links with Waitara.
Her great-uncles, Pine and Hone Taiapa, carved more than 100 marae around Aotearoa, including Owae Marae, while on the East Coast, her great aunts were well-known weavers.
However, she initially learnt to harvest and weave harakeke about 20 years ago from an energetic and wise Englishwoman called Deb Gillanders.
‘‘She taught me the konae, like that little basket on the wall,’’ she indicates a small kete with no handle.
Before harvesting harakeke, Karen believes it’s important to say karakia.
‘‘From the first workshop with Debbie when everyone was able to share their beliefs around prayer and connecting to the earth, it opened my eyes to the different, yet similar beliefs of people.’’
She feels connected to her whakapapa through weaving and to her students’ whakapapa when they share their own experiences.
‘‘I tell my students before we say karakia, that the pronunciation or what we say does not matter as much as what is in our hearts. Because some might not know who Papatūānuku is, but they know who Mother Nature is or Gaia or the Universe,’’ she says.
‘‘I take a few breaths, meditate and thank Tāne Mahuta and wait for the fantail to come and greet me. That’s a sign everything is well.’’
Karen is interested in writing a book on the tikanga around harakeke, a practice that looks after the environment and the weaver.
At the start of her weaving journey, when she was in her early 20s, Karen wove many kete, pıkau (backpacks), pōtae (hats) and putiputi (flowers) and for cousins and extended whānau as special-occasion gifts.
‘‘My sister has a lot of my pieces in her house. She uses them once and puts them on the wall – it’s like a museum.’’
For Karen, her sister’s collection is an invaluable archive that holds the patterns she has used.
Back, 20 years ago, ‘‘I was teaching a few students at home and 10 years later, they started the first weaving course at Te Wananga o Aotearoa and I was invited to join that course’’.
This was a tough time for Karen, who faced new life and loss. Tragically, her 17-year-old son Sonny Wyatt was hit by a car and killed the day before her baby was born.
That was 16 years ago.
‘‘I’m only able to talk about that now. I was numb and my mum stayed with me for my first year and cared for my son [Tahi Waipapa] so I could weave.’’
Over the years, weaving has been Karen’s steadfast companion.
‘‘I just love it. It makes me independent – I’ve got control now. I can put petrol in my car and buy my own chocolate because I’m selling weaving, but mostly I’m teaching.’’
The family gifts continue. ‘‘I’m known for that – every year I hand-make Christmas presents and Christmas cards.’’
And yes, sometimes she will be working until midnight to be ready for the big day.
Other big days are the workshops she holds most weekends, except this September, so she can prepare for the arts trail.
‘‘Sometimes we do workshops with a group of six to make a kōpaki tūpāpaku or burial shroud,’’ she says. ‘‘It’s for someone who’s ill. Usually, the family and friends will come and help.’’
A community from the Far North dedicated to caring for the earth sent down a couple of delegates to learn how to make the harakeke burial shrouds and take the knowledge back to their people.
She also holds short workshops to teach how to make putiputi, konae and how to prepare the harakeke and then make something.
As she talks, Karen’s hands twist and smooth, cross whenu (weaving strips) over whenu, stopping to spray a mist of water and vinegar to soften the strands. This evolving red work is a wall hanging for an organisation.
Weavers were asked to teach volunteers, so Karen set up a space in the Waitara Community House, where she waited every Tuesday for two months.
‘‘But the volunteers didn’t turn up, so I began teaching random people how to weave putiputi.’’
These classes proved so popular people flocked in, including one woman who came on her mobility scooter, until the weavers outgrew the community house.
Karen found a hall, and every Tuesday, taught classes to people of all ages, from tamariki to retired. She asked for a gold coin donation, which paid for hiring the premises and provided a cup of tea.
Women brought along biscuits, baking, preserves and garden produce.
Without realising it, Karen had created a weaving community.
‘‘After a year I decided we should have an exhibition – the whole community was seeing people come away with these bright harakeke flowers,’’ she says.
‘‘We called ourselves The Dream Weavers. It was made up of people of not only different ages, but different religions and cultures.’’
And dream they did, making wall hangings, kete, backpacks, putiputi and piupiu. One woman even made an entire nativity scene out of harakeke.
These were all on show in a shop on the main street for a couple of months.
During this time, Karen ran workshops six days a week, again teaching all ages.
‘‘My Mum and my Aunty Ngoi Ngoi stayed with me for months during and after the exhibition, helping me to harvest and prepare harakeke, including dyeing, for the workshops,’’ she says.
The exhibition was a huge success and Karen was even interviewed on Radio NZ National.
‘‘After that I was very tired. But got emails and texts and phone calls – ‘when’s the next workshop’. I took a month off before I opened this place on September 11, 2017.’’
Around the walls of the studio hang 14 large woven works, each shaped like a four-pointed star.
These were woven by Te Mauri Mana Wahine, made up of Karen and other Taranaki weavers, who were asked to contribute to a travelling exhibition by Maureen Lander, called Flat-Pack Whakapapa. The works were shown at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in 2018.
Stars are still on Karen’s mind as she focuses, with some excitement and some trepidation, on opening her doors for 10 days during the arts trail.
She has been studying astrology, which she says is a lot about spirituality.
‘‘I’m thinking about how to incorporate some of these planetary archetypes into my weaving,’’ she says, hands still twisting, smoothing, crossing.
‘‘I feel a bit embarrassed because people complain about their jobs and I love it. I could do it all day and I do.’’
This story is published as a partnership between the Taranaki Daily News and the arts festival charitable trust TAFT.
‘‘I . . . wait for the fantail to come and greet me. That’s a sign everything is well.’’.