Kelly Ana Morey reviews You Are Here by Whiti Hereaka and Peata Larkin for Aotearoa NZ Review of Books:
‘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.’
Read the rest of the review here.
