with Sereima Adimate, Adriana Māhanga Lear and Tyrone Te Waa.
Join us for a creative workshop where you will enter the worlds of Moana storytellers who will provide inspiration to you to make your own textile artworks.
This workshop will be led by textile artist Tyrone Te Waa. Tyrone will introduce participants to different drawing and stitching techniques. Participants will practice these techniques while enjoying stories told by the different artists.
Moana storytelling is the basis for this creative workshop, including stories of the past and present told by Sereima Adimate, Adriana Māhanga Lear and Tyrone Te Waa, who are a group of musicians, poets, and artists.
This workshop will enable you to learn fundamental skills from a skilled technician, and then reflect on the words and songs of artists by using their stories as a departure point for the drawing and sewing activities.
This will be a laidback but fun and creative workshop. Light refreshments will be provided. On arrival, you will be provided with your own sewing kit and all of the drawing and crafting materials you need to bring stories to life!
The workshops will be broken into four sections:
PART 1 – Story TimeAfter a short intro, the technician will introduce participants to a drawing or stitching technique. Participants will be encouraged to practice the technique as you listen to the stories and songs of the three artists.
PART 2 – Draft Design DrawingEveryone will collectively recall the stories and work on a few quick sketches based on important words and that inspired you.
PART 3 – Stitching The Story TogetherParticipants will turn sketches into textile works. The technician will provide advice and suggestions to help you realise your ideas.
Part 4 – ReflectionsEveryone will discuss the underlining meanings of each story and how they may apply to everyday life.
Age Suitability: all ages (under 16 to be accompanied by an adult)***
Something more?
Once you’ve finished the workshop, stick around for the exhibition launch for two exhibitions:
Te Rūma Moenga / The Mattress Room (Memory Foam) by Tyrone Te Waa Te Rūma Moenga / The Mattress Room (Memory Foam) is a multi-functional art installation. Through the wonderous mind of Auckland-based Tyrone Te Waa, the gallery is transformed into a soft and cozy dreamland with plush carpet covering the gallery surfaces, and a number of sculptural paintings artfully stacked against the walls.
The exhibition draws on Māori cultural experience, with specific references to
marae and
wharenui, to create an interactive environment which can be enjoyed by kids and adults together.
Mood Ring 360°by Sereima Adimate, Chiara Garrett-Saladrau, and Garden Reflexxx Mood Ring - Sereima Adimate’s directorial debut - is splintered into a rush of rushes. This new iteration of the collaborative project is reanimated as a site of quotidian comfort featuring 12 screens of digital video works (including the feature length version of
Mood Ring). “I wanted to document my ongoing journey as
diaspora, and the joys and confusion of knowing what is your home, while also understanding the responsibilities of knowing home.”
A free film that feels like home.
***
About the artists:
Sereima Adimate/ Stelly GSereima Adimate/ Stelly G is a Gadigal-based Fijian performance artist with an anti-colonial practice that foregrounds the Pacific-diaspora experience by interrogating colonial structures that have invited shame and forced us to neglect self-love, communal care, and understanding.
“I love my people, I love myself and I am committed to the evolution of returning to a past that meets the future.”
Tyrone Te WaaTyrone Te Waa (Ngātī Tūwharetoa, Ngātī Maniapoto) is a visual storyteller whose work is led by wonder, curiosity, serendipity, and inquisitive exploration of the sensorial. His practice revolves around a constant delving into the imaginative and expressing the complex ways we make sense of our lived experience.
Tyrone spent his formative years in Kiama on building sites, working for the family restoration business, which no doubt had a major influence on his art practice which often sees him recycle textile and structural materials for his imaginative worlds. He often weaves together the known and the unknown, builds alternative realities and webs together new possibilities with everyday materials found in the seemingly mundane aspects of our lives
Adriana Māhanga LearAdriana Māhanga Lear, AKA Ace [she/they], is a queer Tongan-Australian contemporary artist whose interdisciplinary works focus on gender, sexuality, and identity, underpinned by decolonial, Indigenous self-determination, and social justice movements within and across Moana Oceania. Adriana works across photography, video, sculpture, installation, and sound, and is also a musician, composer/producer, and researcher.
Adriana resides in Wollongong, on unceded Dharawal, Yuin and Wodi Wodi country. She holds ancestral ties to Tu'anuku, Vava'u and Vaipoa, Niuatoputapu, and the matapule title Pā'utu-'O-Vava'u-Lahi, bestowed by esteemed Tongan scholar and artist Hūfanga-He-Akó-Moe-Lotu Dr 'Ōkusitino Māhina.
