In Sleeping Tides, a sardine and raspberry jam sandwich, wool blanket, and my great-grandmother’s sewing basket speak to the colonial past and present of New Zealand. Personal and historic stories emerge from the objects, finding connections in surprising places.

Still from Sleeping Tides. August 2019 – July 2020. HD video, 8m 35s.


Sleeping Tides is chapter one of Moana Calling Me Home, a series of moving-image works from a Master of Visual Arts. This transformational research project is a haerenga — a journey — of reconnection with whakapapa, with ancestral relationships, and with Te Moananui a Kiwa: the ocean and her islands from which these relationships emerged.