Facilitators
Karen Seccombe
PhD Creative Arts, MMVA, BFA, BEd
Art making as a form of social action has become part of my feminist approach. I use glass because I value light. Every work I make responds to a hard-won personal kaupapa and symbols that I have developed in response to my experiences. While stained glass is often seen as a craft rather than an artform it doesn’t matter to me where my work is seen to fit. It matters that it challenges oppression and injustice, it matters that it allows women to see themselves as bodies of light, not broken, damaged, passive ‘victims’, and it matters that people talk about violence openly. My work is my voice, my conduit, my resistance to violence, my form of social activism, my response to the binaries inherent in the complex discourses I work within.
Kelly Jarvis
Te Aitanga a Hauiti
B.SS, Hons Dip. Art & Creativity, NZ Dip Counselling, PGDip Kaitiakitanga
I have worked in the community for the last 15 years, previously as a Woman’s Advocate and Programme Facilitator at Women’s Refuge, and now as a Family Violence Prevention Coordinator, Eco therapist and Rongoā Practitioner within Māori Health. I am a Kaitiaki of the WAI space and Kawa, as well as a collective member, artist and friend.
I began my journey with WAI in 2013. Throughout this time WAI has held space for me on my path to explore and reclaim my identity through creatively expressing and telling my stories, lived experiences and cycles of Te Kore, Te Pō, through to Te Ao Mārama, using multiple art mediums, natural materials and experimental processes that intimately speak to, of and with me. Over the last ten years I have discovered that through connecting to ancestral wisdom in my creative process and observing the intrinsic relationships between people, wairua, and te taiao; the magic and interconnectedness of everything around us in the natural world, my creations are able to intuitively flow through me. Trusting this process provides me with enlightenment and meaning as I make, while strengthening my relationship with my tīpuna, te taiao and ngā atua, through their powerful messages of resistance, strength, nurture and growth. My creative process deepens my understanding, embodiment and protection of the innate mana, indescribable light, sanctity, creative and healing powers and that are within as and surround us as wāhine, through our divine whakapapa to the natural world and beyond. The intention within my art is that my creations act as a conduit of the mauri and rongoā I connect to within the realms of creation, sharing messages from this space of knowing in ways that can often make more sense than words to those that can see their story, in mine.
Along my journey with WAI I have come to the understanding that it is not just the making or the space that makes WAI such a sacred, transformational space. It’s the time, respect, friendships, wisdom, enlightenment and freedom to “Be” shared with other Wāhine that sit within the collective, that makes WAI – WAI.