Bell Hooks said it best
The love we make in community stays with us wherever we go.
Waiho i te toipoto keep close together
Mānawa mai te putaka o Matariki
The New Year festival has an entry fee
Mānawa mai te ariki o te raki
We buy ten dollar candyfloss for the kids in Taupō
that glows
Mānawa mai te Mātahi o te tau
And pay for the kids to go on the ice slide
Mānawatia a Matariki me ōna hua katoa e kainamu mai nei.
Tūrangi is 50 kilometres from Taupō
One road onto Taranaki
As Māori we oscillate constantly between worlds
Renee Cosgrave’s oil paintings are described as sketchy and fragmented
Welcome the emergence of Matariki
Tinfoil stars
Hana was once told that it’s not a burden but a gift
Heads are not to be taken lightly
If you know your history
ET phone home
Welcome the guiding presence of the stars in the sky
Learning and piecing together the parts
A way of being able to walk through multiple worlds at once.
The new wall painting at Glasshouse
Welcome the first light of the new year
Contradictory, messy and ambivalent
Celebrate Matariki and all that it brings.
Ko au te whenua, ko te whenua, ko au I am the land, and the land is me
Ngāti Mutunga and Te Āti Awa
Waiho i te toipoto keep close together
Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāi Tūhoe
Paternal grandmother, my kuia’s line, where some of my tūpuna were born.
But this land is not ours
Or Gertrude Contemporary’s
This is Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country
Things weren’t always like this.
We are like this because
We belong to the worlds of both the coloniser and colonised.
We have been shaped
Every head is hand built
Alive and unfolding.
In the diaspora, our linkages play out in different ways.
Ask what does it mean when we are living on these stolen lands?
Our story here is only a new one.
No two are the same.
On Zoom, Renee’s son clambers on her back
Making work while hapū, as a parent of little ones.
Traces of those who came before me
Vessels
Kei te whakarongo koe? Are you listening?
I mean really listening
Hear the stories
Our ability to adapt, to resist
The countless lives that shape our own.
Uncertainty
Those who stand beside me, and those who will come after.
Like objects uncovered from the earth
Collapsing time
Whakapapa is never fixed
Eyes become places of inward seeing, mouths become vessels for kōrero, waiata and memory.
ET represents the void felt by the children
Maia’s daughter in for a minor operation, arohamai for the slow reply.
Kei te pai, whānau first
Some histories are visible on the surface, while others remain hidden, waiting to be remembered.
Kei te whakarongo koe?
Not one you are expecting, but that’s always the most interesting part.
Homesickness is a universal feeling
A (be)longing for place
Together, their practices create a conversation
What will I learn and how will I grow from this practice of making, sitting and thinking?
A physical and spiritual ache
Shared equally by an alien and a human child.
Things are not locked in place, that is to say, there is nothing more to be known.
It’s simply a translation of knowledge.
Helping E.T. is a way
Mystery and spaces for the not knowing
Complexities, unanswered questions, unanswerable questions.
Flourishing, yearning
The ability to hold two things that seem in direct opposition together at the same time?
The marks of making remain visible.
–
Emma Hislop (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Waitaha) is an artist and writer living and working in Taranaki. She received a CNZ Pierre Manu Emerging Māori Artist Award in 2025 and an Arts Foundation Springboard Award in 2024. Emma’s first book of short fiction, Ruin, was published in March 2023 with Te Herenga Waka University Press and won the Hubert Church Best First Book of Fiction at the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. In 2025 she co-presented ‘Small Acts of Defiance: Tradition and Reinvention in Indigenous Short Stories’ at the 17th International Conference of the Short Story in Ireland. Her fiction and non-fiction writing has been published in Aotearoa and overseas, including Antipodes, How it Works: The Uniqueness of the Short Story, The Listener, Newsroom, Metro, E-Tangata, Action Spectacle, The Spinoff, The Pantograph Punch and Headlands. She has an MA with Distinction from the International Institute of Modern Letters. In 2023 she was awarded the Michael King International Residency at Varuna House, Australia. Emma is part of Paemanu, a collective for Kāi Tahu artists, who have an upcoming group show at the Aigantighe Gallery in Timaru. She is a facilitator for Faber Writing Academy, mentor for Te Kaituhi Māori with the New Zealand Society of Authors and is currently writing a novel.
