Transcript
DIONE JOSEPH: It's full title is actually 'This Woman's Work Is A Woman's Worth" and it came from her experience in working with Pukapukan women, and Pukapuka is an atoll in the Cook Islands, about 13 years ago. And she experienced working with these women who actually worked in the Taro patch. For many of us, our knowledge of Taro is that it's a man's job. Men cultivate the plantation and undertake the harvest. But for Pukapukan women, and Niaval is of Pukapukan descent as well, it's actually the women who do this work and are also often selling the taro as well. We had a very successful opening at Devonport last year as part of Art week and then Niaval was invited to bring the performance installation, as it was now called, to Rarotonga at the Bergman Gallery.
INDIRA STEWART: So when the installation was now taken to the Bergman Gallery in the Cook Islands, what did that look like?
DJ: It was really fascinating because of course we had told them what we're going to do and we said we wanted to bring the culture into the space and they'd already constructed a frame for us in which to build a taro patch and that requires...being set up which are palms, dirt obviously, and we've got this beautiful but very fragile resilient glass sculptures - we actually wanted it to be alive. And we talked to a number of different people including the high-chiefs which in the Cook Islands are called The House of Ariki. And in particular, Makea Vakatini Joe, who is one of the high chiefs, he helped us by actually providing earth. And then the Ministry of Agriculture heard about our work and they offered us brand new varieties as they had just been testing taro plants. And we had the involvement of the entire island as well as my dancers. My dancers were all local 15-year-old girls who had never done contemporary dance before.
IS: How big was that taro patch?
DJ: It was about four metres by three metres.
IS: And the glass taro made by Niaval Ngaro, it's a unique piece of artwork and an incredible way to showcase something that's not just a staple food item all over the pacific, but also a significant part of the economy, subsistence, farming and so on. Did the people who came to view the exhibition - what was their general reaction in seeing taro being used or symbolised in that way?
IS: The beautiful thing was that we didn't begin the exhibition just by having a normal exhibition with a glass of wine and cheese. We began this exhibition, we were helped by a lot of whanau of Niaval's and friends, we began it by actually offering taro samples. So I and one of her cousins actually, we went around offering people - because there are so many different varieties, there's purple taro, there's green, there's yellow, there's white, and so we cooked it and served it to people, with coconut cream of course. So people had a taste for it before it began. So we had a mixture of people. We had people who were from the Cook Islands, locals, we had papa'a's who are people of European descent who also live there, we had a mixture and a range of different people. And the reactions were mostly one of surprise and delight and some were quite quizzical about this very different approach because you know, art galleries can often been seen as such an institution. And to have a multi-ethnic Cook Island performance installation take over, not just the immediacy of the space itself, but also the outside and to draw people in - that was really important to us and we had the blessing of all the elders who turned up.
