Exhibitions
Auckland X-Marks: Conversations in Cloth
Northart, 10 June–3 July BRONWYN LLOYD
Historical record reveals a paucity of written testimonies by missionary women in New Zealand prior to 1823, which led textile scholar and embroiderer Vivien Caughley to make the startling comment in the preface to her book New Zealand’s Historic Samplers (2014) that a sampler ‘may be the only words of a woman which survive’. Underpinning the exhibition X-Marks: Conversations in Cloth, coordinated by Vivien Caughley, Maureen Lander, Jo Torr and Caitlin Timmer-Arends, is the resonant idea of the stitched or ‘marked’ sampler as a forgotten voice that reaches across time to speak its story. Originating at Te Kongahu Museum of Waitangi in 2018, X-Marks appears in a slightly reduced form at Northart.
There is a mystery at the heart of this beautiful and thought-provoking textile exhibition. A Maori woman, referred to as ‘Oreo’, who lived in the household of John King in the Mission settlement in Rangihoua, and who was taught needlecraft skills by his wife Hannah, produced a sampler that was enclosed in a letter sent to the Church Missionary Society in London in 1820. Oreo’s sampler has not been seen since, but despite its absence the sampler’s significance is that it could be seen to represent a fertile and harmonious exchange of knowledge between two women of different cultures and that it might have been the first marked sampler by a Maori woman to travel offshore.
To honour this historical moment, needlecraft practitioners and enthusiasts from around Aotearoa were invited to respond to the story of Oreo’s lost sampler. A diverse selection from 22 artists forms the largest section of the seven-part exhibition, ‘Oreo’s Sampler: X: a new voice’.
A were concerned with the question of whether Oreo’s sampler might have combined Maori visual motifs and craft techniques with European needlecraft. The mix of taniko designs and a traditional cross-stitch alphabet in Helen Schamroth’s three-piece series What if . . . posits that Oreo enthusiastically absorbed the craft skills she was taught by her tupuna wahine, as well as those taught by her Pakeha employer, Hannah King, and that she became ‘a creative force in her own right’. Vita Cochran’s vibrant Aramoana Sampler (2018) also incorporates taniko weaving patterns consisting of 14 different European stitches, and makes a particular feature of red wool in the composition to acknowledge that red was a colour prized by Maori craftswomen at the time Oreo’s sampler was made.
Other contributors speculate about the message Oreo’s sampler might have delivered to the recipient in London. Maureen Lander’s sampler features an exquisitely woven muka ground upon which she has embroidered an imagined portrait of Oreo in simple stem stitch beneath a Maori alphabet and a line of Arabic numerals. Underneath the portrait is the question Ko wai ra ahau? (Please tell me who I am?). The combination of craft techniques and the dual Maori and English text appears to speak to the subject of the dissolution of a person’s distinct identity through cross-cultural exchange. By contrast, the sampler Maahu-Tonga by Lander’s daughter Kerry, a writer and novice embroiderer, which has stitches that are pulled too tightly in places, and a delightfully wonky blanket-stitched border in mismatched thread, represents the joy she experienced imagining herself as Oreo learning to embroider.
The other sections of this remarkable social history exhibition expand outwards from the story of Oreo, and invent narratives, viewers are invited to walk through a fine cotton canopy draped with woven and stitched elements that record the unwritten history of another missionary wife, Jane Kendall, and speculate about the craft techniques that she might have acquired from her interactions with Maori women.
