The arts have always been my home, and now so more than ever after transforming our family living room into a gallery.
Named after my wonderful mother, Kim Meredith Gallery is located in one of the heritage buildings along Symonds Street across the road from the French Cafe. My parents bought the site in 2011 during the Rugby World Cup but more importantly, during our Meleisea family reunion. I was living in an apartment on Karangahape Road and I still remember the pang of remarkable change.
I note here that I grew up without a ‘family home’; in fact I didn’t grow up like any of my peers at Ponsonby Primary, Ponsonby Intermediate and Western Springs. My mother stretched the role of mum and dad, and instead of older siblings to learn from I had flatmates – artists at the beginning of niu worlds.
I lived with the likes of Pauly Fuemana, Teokotai Paitai, Sefa Enari and many other Pacific creatives. While my classmates went away to their family baches at the weekend, I filled my diaries with poems obscure and sweet, surrounded by people who believed I had a future in the arts.
While the flats changed through the years and the people we lived with changed too, again, the arts has always been my home.
You will often hear artists speak of the emotional toll it takes to survive a creative life and sustain passion for the unseen faceless vā we call art. The burden of illuminating your shadow in light of something greater all while living below minimum wage in a sector forged by competitive funding.
Of the millions in funding I have ‘won’ in my career, it has taken years of life experience and having a family to finally see the other edge of the blade. To really empathise with the artists that stayed at home while I travelled the world and organisations that melted into memories while my own flourished.
How can we keep making and keep ourselves in the process?
After leaving [gallery] Tautai as director a year ago, I have swum far enough from the island to look back and realise how sadly sweet it can be to fulfil a dream, to reach the end of the ribbons in your hands and realise the lei is complete.
It takes a real leader, I believe, to wear the lei forward into a new chapter and that’s what my upcoming solo show means to me.
My partner Janet Lilo was the first artist to show at our family gallery in May with the exhibition Remind Me Tomorrow. She moved mountains at our kitchen table, creating the work from nothing to everything with her bare hands.
Our life with the kids is noisy and fast-paced packed with sports and activities. Our talanoa moves through the day from projects to shopping lists to drop offs and pickups. Janet and I create across this harbour of connection. She is the only person I have ever met who makes me feel completely seen.
I think I said yes to being the second artist to show at the gallery because I wanted to come home to myself as an artist. Spending many years uplifting the practice of others has had a cost to my own craft. I also wanted to be in the space right after Janet to have a connective tie.
Although I am not a visual artist, I have a practice of storytelling that serves as the basis of the honest conversation I am having with my first solo show.
How can we keep making and keep ourselves in the process?
I could not survive at the altitude required of publicly funded arts leaders in Aotearoa, so near to the clouds and so far from the sea I almost forgot why I boarded the vaka, determined to pierce the walls of heaven.
My path now is one of radical self-acceptance and tautua to my family. By returning home I return my gifts to their rightful place with my aiga and I call home the light I have shed like tears to return to me.
My exhibition, titled I know a place where only reinvented women go, is 37 limited edition custom playing card decks, with an unpublished poem in bubblegum pink.
My family are obsessed with euchre, a card game that came to us from our patriarch after a short stint at Mt Eden prison. It was there that Grandpa John learned the game that would steal every Meredith’s heart. Since losing him this year, my sadness is a waterfall and this offering is a piece of string across the shiny rock beneath.
Over the years playing euchre has become our family language in place of Gagana Samoa, which my grandparents chose not to pass down. During family gatherings both happy and sad, whether it’s Christmas or someone is in the hospital, we’re playing euchre through it all.
My new one-card poem reflects on a place of reinvention where anything is possible, put on playing cards – the message is one of endless connection.
The 37 handmade offerings that run alongside the playing cards all feature a one-off handwritten poem, concealed from view, giving the objects a mysterious intimacy. They range from poem necklaces to tooth-picked polystyrene and framed works, and are all different conversations I am having with myself and my ancestors. I return here to my Grandpa who passed just a few months ago, he runs through the show like a river.
My journey as a poet has taken me through so many different movements of life. When I fell in love with my partner Janet, being around her wairua transformed my practice. During a very dark depression she would return home to me daily with different materials and leave them on my writing desk. Paints, resin, colourful sparkling oddities. Slowly, I began making.
Over time I came back to life through the astonishing joy of working with my hands and I returned my power to the present moment, where it must ground and belong evermore.
Our lives are not perfect and they never will be as all living things, we are wild islands of change.
I dedicate this show to all the reinvented women coming back to life.
‘I know a place where only reinvented women go’ runs from July 22 - September 2 at Kim Meredith Gallery, 247 Symonds Street.
