Artist Nikau Hindin. Photo / Mataara Stokes.
Nikau Hindin, one of the nine Māori arts practitioners speaking at Auckland Live’s M9 next week, opens up about the responsibility of revitalising the ancient art form of aute.
The aute (paper mulberry) is a slim-trunked tree, brought here alongside kūmara and taro on the waka of ancestors who migrated to Aotearoa many hundreds of years ago. Ubiquitous in Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, it needs careful and constant tending in order to grow straight and strong, and sends out underground shoots to create new plants, spreading quickly so that it is protected by a dense grove of whānau.
In many respects, artist Nikau Hindin (Ngāpuhi, Te Rarawa) is like the aute she uses to revitalise the ancient practice of Māori bark cloth-making, also called aute, in Aotearoa. She is soft yet tough; encircled by community. And she is devoted to passing on knowledge to help others grow.
Casually dressed in cut-off denim shorts and a hoodie in the kitchen of her mum’s Te Atatū home, the Ngāpuhi artist radiates a vitality that puts one in mind of, well, puhi – revered, high-ranking young women who were fiercely protected by their hapū.
The 31-year-old is accompanied by her faithful dog, Rewa, who she shares with her partner, musician and journalist Te Kuru o te Marama Dewes (Ngāti Porou, Te Arawa). The pair are usually based in Gisborne but Hindin has relocated to Tāmaki Makaurau for a while in preparation for an upcoming project. She is actually a “Grey Lynn baby” though, she says.
The now-gentrified central Auckland suburb was still home to many large Māori and Pasifika communities in the 1990s. Hindin’s centred around Newton Primary School’s Te Whānau o te Uru Karaka unit, where she was raised alongside the families of some of Aotearoa’s most influential thought leaders – Leonie Pihama, Te Kawehau Hoskins, Tamsin Hanly, and Jenny Lee-Morgan to name a few. Along with her own mother, clothing designer Debbie Hindin, she says their parents curated the school’s curriculum so that the children learned about art, politics, colonisation and critical histories of Aotearoa.
“All of our parents were brainy … we were super-politicised from a really young age. We celebrated Matariki every year. We learned how to grow and harvest kūmara. We had a tikanga Māori approach to everything we did.”
After high school (where the high-achiever repped Auckland in football and even trained with the U17 World Cup development squad), Hindin pursued a conjoint degree in Māori Studies and Film, and Fine Arts at Elam.
She recollects only seeing examples of the “solo artist” at art school. “Making work that was really meaningful to them but that had little impact on their community or their culture. I thought, there’s no f***ing way I’m becoming an artist. They’re the most selfish, self-indulgent ... it was such a turn-off.”
She says she left, with no ambition to pursue an arts career, to “work in TV for a few years”, later applying on a whim to the University of Hawai’i to continue studying towards a masters degree. It was while in a class learning to make kapa (Hawaiian bark cloth) that she first rediscovered the Māori-made aute. Although, she admits, Māori stone tools expert Dante Bonica had mentioned it to her before. “He showed me an aute tree at [the University of Auckland’s] Waipapa marae before I even went to Hawai’i! And then when someone there said, ‘Oh, Māori used to make aute’ a little lightbulb went off and I thought, this is something I can learn and take home.”
On her return to Aotearoa in 2013, lacking a teacher specifically in aute-making, she continued to develop the process with help from makers from other islands and disciplines. She names Bonica, Verna Takashima, Kaliko Spencer, Wesley Sen, Rangi Kipa, Hina Kneubuhl and Ebonie Fifita among her trusted teachers and tuākana.
With no surviving examples of the cloth, the only evidence of the practice was a handful of wooden beaters, patu aute or pāoi, in Auckland War Memorial Museum, along with references to the material by early European ethnologists. The plant itself was also thought to be extinct – supposedly the cooler climate meant the plant struggled to survive – but Hindin says a number of Māori communities she has been involved with maintain that groves have continued to exist in Aotearoa.
There is a “medium” abundance of aute here now, she says. Hindin has done five large harvests from a grove in the far north. Plus, she says, there are more in Tāmaki, Kirkiriroa and Te Matau-a-Māui (the location of Te Aute College).
“It has to be looked after, because it spreads. It’s not something you’d plant in your garden, because it will take over. The side branches have to be pruned so it grows straight.
“It’s probably more prolific than people realise.”
It took five years of experimentation to refine the process she uses now, which includes harvesting according to the maramataka, removing the bark, scraping away the fibres with shells, long hours of beating, fermenting the material, and then beating again. She adds that only then, once she was satisfied she had achieved a sufficient level of skill in making the aute, did she start painting it. “Why would I start painting on them if I don’t know how to make the cloth yet? I think it’s important to sit with your teachers before you go out into the world. You just have to humble yourself because there’s so much to learn from staying in that student space.”
Once she finally began putting brush to cloth, it was in the form of earth pigments such as kōkōwai and ngārahu. The artist began making star maps, two-dimensional interpretations of the star compass she first glimpsed during her time in Hawai’i spending time with apprentice navigators and the crew of the waka Hōkūle’a.
“The whakapapa of all of my tauira [patterns] come from tukutuku and whatu raranga, so it comes from a Māori textile language,” she explains. “I stay within that realm because those are patterns created by women. They’re created from a framework of weaving, which means it’s within a grid. They’re integrated into the texture of the textile.”
For nearly two years now, however, Hindin’s focus has been on creating a succession plan. The foundation has been the connection with her teina, artist and curator Rongomai Grbic-Hoskins (Ngāti Hau, Ngāti Hao, Ngāti Moroki, Ngāti Pākahi, Ngātiwai).
In 2021, the pair applied to Creative New Zealand for Te Uru Aute, an apprenticeship programme to support the transmission of all Hindin had learned to Grbic-Hoskins. Their existing relationship as tuakana teina (Grbic-Hoskins was a younger member of Te Whānau o te Uru Karaka) made it all the easier.
“That’s probably why me and Rongomai have such a strong bond, because we grew up the same,” says Hindin. “There’s not that many kids that can relate to that.”
Grbic-Hoskins remembers Hindin as a kind, determined child, who was already a patient teacher. “She taught me to do handstands!” she laughs.
She describes the initial invitation to enter into an apprenticeship as an honour, likening it to the call-and-response of karanga. “You’re responding to someone’s karanga with your intention, and the intention comes back and forth between you. Being asked is important, entering into a relationship in a way that is formal.”
The pair established the tuakana-teina framework with help from Gail Richards and Bethany Edmunds of Toi Ngāpuhi, and set to work. “Just knowing we had the support of our iwi was really foundational,” recalls Grbic-Hoskins.
She moved to Gisborne where they worked closely every day for four months. They were tasked with documenting the process in a book and short film, as well as running wānanga with other pia (students). This meant going home to Hindin’s tūrangawaewae of Motukaraka in Hokianga, the home of her father, Koro Harris, who gathered kaimoana and looked after the attendees every day.
The pair went on to explore the creation of manu aute – kites made from aute that were traditionally used both for recreation and for communication with other pā, often for signalling danger.
Grbic-Hoskins is unequivocal in her admiration for her mentor. “It takes a lot of intention and hard work. It can be a really lonely space working as a solo practitioner with an art form that doesn’t have the support of an institution. There’s a lot of risk she has to take.”
“I hope people see how seriously she takes this practice because we’re thinking 50 years, 100 years down the road. Not just the next exhibition. Our goals are much longer than that.
The founders of Season gallery, Jade Townsend (Ngāti Kahungunu, Te Ātihaunui-a-Pāpārangi) and Francis McWhannell, who showed 17 of the manu aute in a solo exhibition in March last year, say they can attest to the fact that Hindin is one of the more rigourous artists they have worked with.
“There’s this interesting balance of sweetness, gentleness and warmth, which is Nikau the person, but then you attend to the work which has a physical manifestation that tells you quite a lot about what’s also going on, that isn’t as frequently discussed,” says McWhannell, adding that Hindin holds herself to an “extraordinarily high standard”.
“Nikau always talks about her pieces as being collectively made,” says ownsend, “and because of that she’s the guardian of these pieces. So when she’s being staunch in her standards and requirements, it’s because she’s representing many other makers and, of course, ancestors.”
The show was very successful, certainly in commercial terms. The ubiquitous red dots that signal a sale appeared next to nearly all of the pieces by the end of opening night. But more so, says Townsend, because it was “magical and playful” and instilled “hope and optimism” in their patrons.
“People stayed for a long time because they wanted to look at things from multiple vantage points. They were so inspired to go and make things, and ask their whānau if they know anything about aute. To mine for knowledge.”
Despite being what most would describe as a “successful artist”, Hindin sees herself as a cultural practitioner first and foremost. “But I have to navigate the art world as a means of survival,” she adds.
“They’re both equally difficult to negotiate. Especially revitalising a process, and being a kaitiaki of that knowledge and wanting it to be practised in a certain way. I have very high expectations of anyone who comes under me because we’re the first in a long time. Mediocre is just not gonna cut it. Toi Māori is the epitome of excellence.”
On this day, Hindin is deep in preparation for the next phase – an installation of 100 manu aute as part of O Quilombismo, a programme exploring global forms of resistance at the House of World Cultures in Berlin. She and Grbic-Hoskins have been painting eight hours a day, for three weeks straight. There are still 45 manu aute left to complete and the deadline is one week away.
“I want these kites to be very flamboyant,” she says, pointing to the decorative tails and tassels spread out on her mother’s garage floor, deftly crafted from tīkumu (mountain daisy).
“The visual language all starts from the harvesting, to the beating, to the watermark on them. Because the watermark is strong, I decided to do these really simple lines. These are like the heke (rafters) of our whare, but it’s also based on something I’ve been reading about how we used to adorn our faces and bodies with kōkōwai.”
The “watermark” or waitohu is thanks to finely carved lines on the beaters – beautiful objects unto themselves – that make an impression in the paper, leaving behind the patu’s fingerprint. Hindin shows off two belonging to her and Grbic-Hoskins, made for them by Ruatōrea carver Eruera Brown.
She presents another, this one unadorned. Her very first, she says, made nine years ago.
“I made it myself.”
Nikau Hindin appears at M9 on July 6. M9 is a ground-breaking hybrid of Ted Talks. Other artists featured include Nigel Borell, Mr G, Tame Iti, Maisey Rika, Veranoa Hetet, Sian Montgomery-Nuetze, The Hori, and Hoturoa Barclay-Kerr.
Visit: aucklandlive.co.nz/show/m9
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