Southside sista

London-based Polynesian artist Rosanna Raymond talks to RACHEL HELYER DONALDSON on the eve of a working trip home.

It's a sunny, wintry Saturday afternoon and Brixton, London's Southside, is buzzing. Gucci and Chloe shades are de rigueur. Bass booms out of the back of a shiny BMW. On such a day, walking to New Zealand artist Rosanna Raymond's house in Brixton's back streets can remind you of Auckland's suburbs. Replace the polluted air with the scent of hibiscus and jasmine and the winding rows of colourful houses could be in Grey Lynn or Onehunga.

Raymond admits walking around the cultural melting pot of Brixton has made her nostalgic for home. "Mainly because of the food you can buy at Brixton market - the breadfruit, taros and yams. It's like South Auckland, or K Rd but with 50,000 more people on it."

Raymond, 35, has lived in London with her husband, photographer and film-maker Kerry Brown, and their two children - Salvador, 10, and Malia, 6 - since 1999.

Her varied career includes establishing fashion show Style Pasifika in 1992, working with Brown on fashion and music shoots as a styling and casting director, and her involvement with performers and artists' collective Sistas S'Pacific.

She also makes taonga - prestigious costumes and jewellery made from materials sourced from around the Pacific - using Polynesian craft techniques and inspired by Samoan legend or poetry. Raymond started to write poetry in 1998 to describe these pieces. She now has a body of work she hopes to publish and has started doing spoken-word gigs in London. In her resume, she describes herself as a "tusitala", a teller of tales. "My work is a celebration of my mixed cultural heritage as a Sa-Lagi [Samoan/Papalagi] with tangata whenua overtones."

With her art rooted in the Pacific, living in London means Raymond has had to make some major adjustments to her work practices. But it has taught her a lot and, she says, developed her writing.

She has also been educating British academics on matters Pacifica. They, in turn, have made her realise how significant an impact Polynesian culture has had on New Zealand over the past decade. And she has surprised herself as a Samoan by joining London kapa haka group Ngati Ranana.

Raymond is back in New Zealand for Dolly Mix (W)rapper - an exhibition by and of women of Pacific descent at the Waikato Museum of Arts and History. Today she's there to explain her multi-media and installation works and take a writers' workshop for children.

She is selling her jewellery at Auckland's Pasifika Festival later in the week, and she'll also perform her poetry there.

A week before she left London, Raymond was sorting out the costumes and jewellery for the trip home. In her front room, she dressed an antique dressmaker's dummy with a coconut-shell bra. A male torso was draped with a necklace of dried eel skins. These relate to the legend of the Fijian eel god Tuna and Sina, sea goddess of Samoa. Tuna died for her love and the coconut tree grew from his buried head. Its fruit bear his face and watch over her. It's a legend Raymond uses frequently in her work: "It's part of our creation and mythology, and some of the older versions are quite saucy. The coconut turned into a negative name to call an islander but it is such an important part of our culture."

Raymond has continued her study of Pacific legends and artefacts in London, researching at the Museum of Mankind.

"I didn't have any of my resources over here, but I knew they had lots of stuff there. And I wanted to see what they had. Being so fresh here, I rang up and asked if I could come to the library and do some research. This incredibly posh voice goes, 'Oh no, who are you?"'

Nevertheless, Raymond was given a six-month study ticket for the museum. She is also working for the British Museum on an exhibition and book, The Clothing of the Pacific.

In the process, she has given the academics a grassroots view of Polynesian culture. "They're into the ceremonial aspects of tapa and I tell them people also stick it on the wall at home and they're like, 'Really?"'

A photo of a pair of patchwork tapa jeans was a revelation to them. "They said, 'My God, you've totally modernised our project.' Good."

Eighteen months in a storeroom, sorting and cataloguing tapa cloths, gave Raymond an insight into the system that holds these taonga. "They are entrenched in these old dinosaur places but museums are changing. My point is to get them so they're accessible to the people for whom they have a very different cultural meaning other than artefacts and material culture."

The British Museum has also commissioned Raymond to write an essay about the early years of her work within Auckland's Pacific Island community. It's now a decade since Style Pasifika helped a new generation of Polynesians express themselves and alternative magazines such as Stamp and Brown's Planet used Polynesian models.

From the perspective of living in Britain, Raymond can observe how far multicultural New Zealand has come. But in the early 90s, she had to push hard to get a range of faces - and colours - on television screens.

"Now you look at New Zealand and Pacifica and the arts and it's just incredible, a lot of people wouldn't question the work I'm doing or the images you see in a magazine. But eyebrows were raised and issues were talked about: it was shocking. This is what the British Museum made me realise - people weren't used to it. And all this work was done in fashion - that great everyday tool."

Raymond's costumes carry on this work. Characters like Handmaiden Aotearoa and Full Tusk Maiden - "my answer to the Dusky Maiden" - make a statement about the value of beauty in different cultures.

As an international model in the late 80s, Raymond was the dusky exotic: "I've got all the recognisable attributes of Polynesia but it's all wrapped up in that Dusky Maiden package where it's non-threatening: the nose is not too wide, the hair's not too curly. You can be brown but you can't be too dark."

Modelling took her to Europe, but she had also lived in Britain as a 10-year-old, in the North England town of Teeside. She grew up in New Zealand's little England, Christchurch.

Raymond has found new possibilities in London, where her jewellery and costuming work has changed drastically.

"I call it my English influence. The English aesthetic is so different to ours. For us, size matters, it says, 'I am important, I have mana.' Here, they look at that with really different eyes."

For materials, Raymond can't rely on a cousin bringing back pua'a seeds or shark's teeth from the islands. She still uses greenstone, but from China, not Aotearoa. She sells to friends, and is also stocked in London's The Cross where Jade Jagger sells her work, and in New York's Calypso.

Last November Raymond exhibited her work in A Matau Pakiwaitara at New Zealand House, along with George Nuku, Priscilla Cowie, Tony Pecoctic and Makaere Raimona. In June she will exhibit at the Brixton Art Gallery.

Malaika's Kitchen - a weekly workshop in Brixton - inspired Raymond to develop her spoken word poetry. There, she's met people from Ghana, Nigeria, Jamaica and Trinidad, each with tales of colonialism and its effect on their culture. Raymond also performs with Ngati Ranana, most recently in front of 4500 people for a Waitangi Day concert starring Tim Finn, Dave Dobbyn and Bic Runga at the Brixton Academy.

"If you had asked me in New Zealand if I would ever be involved in kapa haka I would have said I doubt it very much."

But in London, it makes perfect sense. "Ranana means London. So being Ngati Ranana, I am the tribe of London."

* Dolly Mix (W)rapper, 20 Art Statements from the Aualuma in Aotearoa, Waikato Museum of Art and History, until May 5.

* Pasifika Festival 2002, Western Springs, Friday night and Saturday.