Selling Yarns 2

Innovation for sustainability

 

Papers

If you would like to be notified of program changes, workshop and registration information, please subscribe your name and email address. We respect your privacy and will not share this information nor use it for any other purpose.



Contemporary Traditional

Session: Perspectives on practice Saturday 7 March 2009 1:10 - 2:20pm

Rigel Sorzano

Writer and Curator,

Abstract

Indigenous makers currently working in superimposed cultures face particular issues in striving for a creative practice which is consistent with their own identity and their needs as contemporary makers. Amongst these is the relationship between the traditional and the contemporary.

Although not an issue confined to indigenous practice - the implied polarity between traditional and contemporary is barely submerged in the murky swamps of the craftversus-art or craft-versus-design debates, and lurks in the shadows of discussions about handmaking and mass production, or one-offs and multiples - it may, for those practitioners, be complicated by the association of traditional with 'authentic' and contemporary with 'innovative'.

Strong traditional practices support cultural and creative health and sustainability. They consolidate identity, providing meaning and connection. As traditional Maori weaver Kataraina Hetet has said: "Weaving binds us; it ties us close together as whanau (family). It ties us to those that have gone and the future yet to come. When we weave we remember those that have nurtured this skill in us and honour them through continuing the tradition of weaving." (Label text, "Gift Exchange" exhibition, TheNewDowse, Lower Hutt, New Zealand, 2006)

However, anyone engaged in making today is in some sense a contemporary maker, and innovation is a natural and important part of the creative process. True innovation - which may be incremental rather than sudden - represents not simply change, but a creative response which reflects confidence, vigour, and an ongoing engagement with the cultural medium.

This paper will consider some of the ways current practitioners in Aotearoa/New Zealand have approached this dichotomy in pursuing a sustainable creative practice.

See also: Rigel Sorzano's biography