You Are Here
by Whiti Hereaka and Peata Larkin

You Are Here is the sixth book in the kōrero series that curated and edited by Lloyd Jones and published by Massey University Press. The series has bought together a number of creative couplings to produce texts that explore topics from a viewpoint less taken in traditional publishing. More art. Less commercial. This is not the first time Jones has done this. In the early 2000s his own Four Winds Press published a series of stand-alone essays as palm-sized perfections. The kōrero series plays broadly across the same territory as the FWP essays but are looser which allows much more room in You Are Here for Whiti Hereaka – one of our most poetic and esoteric prose writers – to stretch and flex her writerly skills.

The book also celebrates Peata Larkin who is making some really interesting and fiercely contemporary artwork that while non-traditional speaks as it should to te ao Māori. Hereaka and Larkin are cousins, which means that You Are Here explores whakapapa that is especially meaningful to both. ‘Whiti and I resonated with the idea of “going home”’, Larkin says, ‘which was a theme given to us by Lloyd.’ It was ‘the initial conversations with Whiti and Lloyd that ignited our journey of describing what going home really meant, but also how subjective those two words were.’

Both evoke the central volcanic lands of Te Ika-a-Māui, where land and water and mud heave and steam is fuelled by an underground thermal fury and the land is studded with maunga, lakes and native bush. The built structures of its people – the traditional whare and the Ratana Temple at Raetihi – feature in some of Larkin’s works, the ones that feel like swathes of William Morris fabrics or wallpaper. I’m certainly not the first to make this connection between the late-nineteenth Century British Arts and Crafts decorative movement and traditionally conceived but irrevocably contemporary Māori decorative schemata, and I won’t be the last.

Ko Tongariro tōku maunga (2020)

In the interview that accompanies the press kit and book, both Hereaka and Larkin mention being cut from the same cloth, ‘which enables,’ says Larkin, ‘the threads of the fabric to shine through’. Some of the art works themselves feature hundreds of tiny cuts in silk laid out in rhythmic mark making. Hereaka also speaks of the artworks as part of an exploration finding pathways home: they are, essentially, maps. The artworks in silk with their encoded signs remind me of the microscopic but incredibly detailed silk maps that British armed services personnel, mainly RAF, were given during WWII so if they ended up behind enemy lines they had a reasonable chance of making it home. Good art/writing does this. It gets the viewer/reader to crack open the vaults of their own experience and participate in the journey on a myriad of levels, each utterly idiosyncratic. Every pathway home is relevant. There’s more than one story at play here and this is what I really like about Hereaka’s writing and Larkin’s art.

Both could have approached the topic in any number of ways – including something conventionally and recognisably Māori. But into this mix that is resolutely and unapologetically Māori and deeply personal, Hereaka and Larkin throw in a Fibonacci sequence to provide structure for both the words and the artworks. Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, also known as Fibonacci, introduced the sequence to Western European mathematics in his 1202 book Liber Abaci and at first glance the resonance here would seem something of a stretch.

But this is a sequence found in the natural world, its numbers and ratios found in natural occurrences such as branching in trees, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruit sprouts of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke, and the arrangement of a pinecone’s bracts. Most importantly, from a te ao Māori perspective, the sequence also occurs in the uncurling of a punga frond/koru, and in the patterns of water.

There was something so familiar about You Are Here, so palpably redolent of Italo Calvino, the Italian mid-century post-modernist short story writer and novelist: Calvino structured his 1972 novel Invisible Cities – the most poetic town planning schedule ever written – entirely within the boundaries set by a series of Fibonacci sequences. Good ideas never get old and how wonderful it is that this pairing of classical mathematical theory with te ao Māori should work together so well. Having unfurled to show you its glory You Are Here contracts and curls up on itself again. Back at the beginning. Expanding and contracting. Breathing in and breathing out.