What Am I Doing Here?

From very early in her young life there were signs that Paitangi Ostick was never meant to be your average little girl or, indeed, your average big girl.

Her mother is Maori and her father was a Yorkshireman but it wasn't the biculturalism that singled her out. It was more that from around the age of eight, she loved to carve. She'd pinch her father's engineering files and would chisel away on anything she could find when she wasn't drawing or making collage out of lolly paper or whatever she could lay her active hands on. And by the time she was 13 she found herself in her version of heaven.

"Dad bought me my first dremel and I had a go at everything; bone, wood, ostrich eggs, stone, whatever was available and it just didn't stop."

Her Maori mother was of a generation whose cultural identity was somewhat oppressed, particularly in school, and she tended not to identify herself as Maori so it's somewhat ironic that Paitangi's carving was encouraged by her English father. Her maternal grandfather, though, taught her about Maori medicines and would speak to her in Maori as they wandered through the bush looking for healing plants. Years later, when she moved to Waitangi, she found herself remembering the language and the protocols almost subliminally.

She went to Otahuhu College in Auckland and passed Bursary art even if her spirit of non-conformity constantly questioned why she had to draw this way or paint that way or why she couldn't mix certain mediums; she simply couldn't understand the creative restrictions being placed on her and in some ways she still doesn't accept them. Perhaps she was always destined to be singular, to exhibit her spirit both literally and figuratively.

When her children were little she taught herself to knit and then made up her own patterns and stitched her own designs. And the kids will now tell you they went to sleep at night to the sound of the carving machine whirring away in another room; the urge to express the creative was always present.

It's probably why she has become the only woman tattooist in the Far North and one of only a handful in New Zealand. It hasn't been an easy road to travel and there has been a palpable resistance from a number of quarters, even within her own tribal connections and ethnicity of Ngati Wai, Ngati Hine and Ngapuhi.

"There are those who say a woman shouldn't carve or tattoo. And the sad thing is other tattooists don't always offer support because I'm a woman. It got to me for a while, and to my kids, but I've learned to let that go now."

She is very selective professionally. She won't do names or Chinese or Japanese script because she says it's important to know and understand what she is etching on to skin. And she'd turn down a potential client if she didn't think the tattoo was right for her to do. She says the best skill a tattooist can have is to listen and indeed, for her own moko, she listened to herself.

"Part of it is an owl. My Ngati Wai comes in with the tail of the stingray. The gap in the middle is like an umbilical chord or road that connects to the spiritual world and the black lip is because I do karanga."

It represents her intrinsic soul and as if being a woman tattooist isn't enough to establish her individualism, her moko surely is - it was chiselled by hand.

Photo images of Paitangi will be on display at the Kaan Zamaan Art Gallery in Kerikeri as part of an exhibition celebrating Matariki and featuring 25 local artists. The Importance of Remembering runs from 8 June - 31 August.