The idea of inherited creativity is not obviously supported by history, though anyone looking for a plausible case can’t resist that of Patricia Grace, her daughter-in-law Briar Grace-Smith, and her granddaughter (Briar’s daughter) Miriama Grace-Smith, who were recently brought together in a panel discussion at this year’s Semi Permanent festival, held at St James Theatre in Wellington.
A large part of the fascination with these three women, an all-star team with the strongest of imaginative roots, is the sense of entangled familyhood: they bounce around ideas about projects and each tell stories connected to the place and land they live on, their identity as women and as Māori, and the history and politics of Aotearoa.
Across their lifetimes, they have also each become something of a preeminent figure. In 1975, with Waiariki, Patricia became the first Māori woman to publish a book of short stories. Her name is now synonymous with a keen observer who knows the power of words and how to care for them; whose chief virtue, even as she exhilarates in the cosmos of fiction, is truth-teller, carving space for Māori characters that are rooted in everyday experience — real and palpable and representational in their sheer ordinariness. It has become commonplace to hear her described as a generational icon: an oracle, all-seeing and instinctual, with the adoration and heart of a national treasure.
Briar, at the time of our interview, was nearing the end of an international writing residency in Iowa, working on a feature film script, and remotely editing a forthcoming new season of the gentle transgender drama Rūrangi. In 2018, she was named an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit. Then there’s her masterly 2021 film Cousins, adapted from Patricia’s 1992 novel of the same name and co-directed with Ainsley Gardiner. The third feature film to ever be directed by wāhine Māori, it charts the different paths and genealogical ties of three Māori women. It is a beautiful feat, in the way that a painting can be beautiful — atmospheric and wholly intimate, but also wrenching.
Pōneke-based Miriama — curator, fashion designer, illustrator and one third of Dream Girls Art Collective — is at the centre of Wellington’s precise, explosive murals that are a fabric of the city; coils of trippy striped limbs, serpent tongues and taniwha as bright as neon lights wash its topography with the spirit of a restless anarchist. Some creatures have no conceivable beginning and end, as if they’re a cooler-than-thou aurora borealis.
For all of this, Patricia, Briar and Miriama are almost unfathomably humble. Patricia says that she never thought should would have learnings to pass down to Briar and Miriama. “Each has her own talents and skills, and her own journey.” Yet one feels that they are each most potent when they really tap into what’s around them: a close-knit, convivial family, as much a part of one another as their art.
When Briar was 14, her mother gave her a copy of Mutuwhenua, Patricia’s debut novel. “The protagonist [Ripeka] was like me, working out her identity,” says Briar. “I had never read a story that I connected to so strongly. I put it down and then stared at it and picked it up again and reread it. Writing was also my passion then, and the book, because the protagonist’s story was similar to mine, told me that I had stories to tell too. It made me think seriously about my writing.”
I asked them each to describe what the push and pull of the creative process with one another is like, and their answers were galvanizingly the same: there’s laughter, often, as if a sense of humour was the admission standard for a lifetime membership to a club only few can join.
There’s also an openness, a loosening-up. “I believe when you work with whanau, you’re never too afraid to ask the questions you are unsure about,” says Miriama, who was on set as an art director for Cousins. “It’s like being at the marae, you do the best you can to work together because you’re all working towards the same goal.”
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Advertise with NZME.“I think our differences are more to do with age and experience than anything else,” says Briar. “Patricia is definitely the wisest and more considered of us all, I still tend to be a bit of a risk-taker, but that might be more to do with the industry I work in, which is all about risk. Miriama, being the youngest, has had the benefit of listening to us both.”
While Miriama’s sprawling artworks are modern, imbued with, rather than apart from, the rush of time, they linger on what came before. She describes approaching a blank mural like “going into a whare, except you’re in open space”. You can imagine her looking out from the centre, observing her surroundings with a glittering curiosity, recalling her grandmother.
“I learned when I was writing to put myself in the middle, and start from the middle,” said Patricia at Semi Permanent, which saw renowned creatives share their perspectives over a series of events, “to use [a] koru shape, that spiral, to go around and around until you come to a conclusion.”
Miriama’s psychedelic arms and tails reach out and twist like live wire, and settle.
Julia Gessler attended Semi Permanent courtesy of WellingtonNZ.
