Waitohi ki tai, Waitohi ki uta was commissioned by the Wellington City Council and installed in December 2020.

https://wellington.govt.nz/arts-and-culture/arts/public-art/art-at-waitohi/waitohi-ki-tai

“Kilford was inspired by the whakapapa of Kauri and Parāoa (Sperm Whales). The artwork, Waitohi ki tai Waitohi ki uta connects the land with water and acts as a bridge to the other artworks situated on the same wall, the spine of the building – Whetūrangi by Maureen Lander and He Raukura by Matthew McIntrye Wilson.

Kilford’s design is centred around the idea that within Māori whakapapa, Kauri and Parāoa (Sperm Whale) are brothers. To research this whakapapa Kilford went to Waipoua Forest in Northland to talk to experts from Te Roroa about the trees and the whakapapa.

Bringing together these two brothers – giants of the ocean and of the forest – references the story of Kauri and Parāoa when they resided together in the forest. Kauri and Parāoa may well live together again in this Anthropocene era if sea levels continue to rise and meet the forest. This whakapapa is fitting too given the architectural inspiration for Waitohi as a forest clearing.”

Kilford’s series Te Māra Tautāne explores and celebrates invisible whakapapa connections between the earthly and celestial realms at Matariki. It is an offering to Matariki as the constellation enters the Tangaroa phase of the Maramataka.

https://www.thebigidea.nz/events/223563-te-mara-tautane-angela-kilford

Angela Kilford & Aliyah Winter

Wellington Railway Station & Jervois Quay

In 2018, the Wellington City Arts and Events team commissioned two Waituhi projects for Matariki. Puawānanga was selected for two locations in Wellington city.

The closing of space between sky and water during Matariki is illustrative of the close connection between Papatūānuku (earth mother), Ranginui (sky father) and the celestial beings. During Matariki the stars, specifically the rising of Puanga mark the beginning of the new year. In whakapapa and Māori cosmology Puawānanga (Clematis paniculata) is the daughter of Puanga and Rehua and is a harbinger of spring indicating the time for harvesting tuna (eels).

The work Puawānanga incorporates signs of the earthly realm through the image of Puawānanga and the celestial realm with the constellation of Matariki emerging from the cluster of other stars. Situating Puawānanga in the celestial realm serves to celebrate the close connections between all things through whakapapa.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/arts/104820741/artist-duos-celestialinspired-art-brought-to-life-through-matariki-public-art-scheme

The Performance Arcade, 2018

Wellington Waterfront

Weaving the walk sees the artist creating a path using a set amount of harakeke blades (stripped and halved phormium tenax leaves). As the path grows the artist inches along with it as she lays down each piece of harakeke. Once the harakeke runs out the artist must deconstruct the path behind her in order to grow the path in another direction or advance forward.

The weaving route is significant in that it crosses the old Wellington shoreline, before moving back towards the waterfront built on reclaimed land. The work draws on the history of the moving shoreline which has moved and reformed each time land has been reclaimed.

The performance also reminds us of the instability of that shoreline. The underlying reason for weaving in these works is to reinforce the value of Mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge systems); Mātauranga being a stabilising force in the artist’s changing environment.

https://www.theperformancearcade.com/angela-kilford

Puawānanga - Stars of the Forest
Angela Kilford & Aliyah Winter
June 2017
Cnr Tory and Vivian streets

During Matariki the stars, specifically the rising of Puanga mark the beginning of the New Year. In whakapapa and in Māori cosmology, puawānanga (Clematis paniculata) is the daughter of Puanga and Rehua. Artists Angela Kilford and Aliyah Winter connect earthly and celestial realms in their temporary billboard project throughout June 2017. The artists created a constellation of puawānanga blooms celebrating the close connections between all things through whakapapa.

Aliyah Winter & Angela Kilford

A performance presented for Performing, writing symposium, March 2017. Aliyah Winter & Angela Kilford

Māori practices of karakia, waiata and manaakitanga were employed to establish and maintain relationships between performers, audience, atua, and tupuna. These practices and approaches affected the audience’s reception of the textual and verbal elements of the work.

The subject matter of the performance, whakapapa, though originally an oral practice has been expressed in more recent times in written chart form.  As a way of recording family relationships, whakapapa is more often found to include human kin, past and present and atua, marae, maunga, awa and other non-human beings.

Whakapapa, the verb and the noun was a live performance on Matiu Somes Island one of the nostrils of the fish of Te Whanganui a Tara, Wellington Harbour. The waters, air, animals and plants informed the whakapapa that was later performed through storytelling and recorded in situ as written charts for live viewing. The work allowed the audience to make the connections between the performed stories and the visual representation of whakapapa. Thus, the performance of writing was as important to the work as the oral presentation.

Through the artists implementation of tikanga, using the principles of manaakitanga, and the ritual acts of karakia and waiata, the gap between the audience and the performers was  symbolically and literally diminished. The experiential dimensions of the performance through this tikanga reflected the content and purpose of whakapapa in its capacity to situate humans within a larger ecological context and Māori worldview. To this end the article will begin with a karakia, as an opportunity to achieve closeness between the reader and the writer and will explain the steps taken by the performers to address the tikanga of the spatial environment.  The performative power of the spoken and written word is demonstrated through acts of ritual and performance.  

A collaborative project carried out as part of Commonground Festival 2017:Groundwater. Feb 25- Mar 4, 2017

‘Waterways precede and sustain our existence in the present.’

JOHANNA MECHEN, ANGELA KILFORD AND ALIYAH WINTER

Walks and a screening around Waiwhetu that explored how water can be valued in different ways. Connecting two different bodies of water (the stream and aquifer), water aging and whakapapa, the project involved Te Atiawa o Waiwhetu, local community and GNS Science. Voiceover and script: Teri Puketapu.

For more information visit: http://commongroundfestival.org.nz/portfolio/wairua-wai-rua/

or listen here: https://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/standing-room-only/audio/201831132/water-art-at-common-ground-festival

Photographs by Dionne Ward

A webpage work for Enjoy Gallery's Occasional Journal 2016, Local Knowledge.

The page incorporates ideas from Kilford & Winter's earlier project No stone unturned for the Performance Arcade. A visual chart, "A whakapapa born of looking and seeing at Waitangi Park" accompanies sound recordings of whakapapa stories.

http://enjoy.org.nz/publishing/the-occasional-journal/local-knowledge/title-tbc-2#article

PARKing Day is an annual worldwide event where artists, designers and citizens transform metered parking spots into temporary public ‘parks’.  

PARK(ing) Day Wellington is organised by the Wellington Sculpture Trust in association with Wellington City Council. 

During 2016, Angela Kilford and Aliyah Winter occupied the parking space by weaving and talking to people passing by about the whakapapa (geneaolgy) of the local ecology.

A project presented as part of the Performance Arcade 2016

No Stone Unturned was an opportunity to explore ecology and diversity in the city through a series of walks led by artists Angela Kilford and Aliyah Winter.  The project questioned how we value different types of knowledge. The artists employed whakapapa (genealogy) and raranga (weaving) to explore the connections between people and place.

No Stone Unturned occupied a 20ft container at the Performance Arcade, where a collaboration between the artists, participants and the Manaia weavers from Hikoikoi, Petone, took place. Here the dialogue that began in the walks continued through learning and making.

Presented as part of Performing Mobilities Symposium in Melbourne, below is the abstract written for the Symposium publication:

"Walk on fallow lands II is a performance work that invites people to walk the land - and engage with the heavy and multiple narratives of colonisation - thereby excavating the multiple histories in the landscape. The act of walking, as ritual and guiding, brings forth oral histories and a valuing of land. The work simultaneously proposes an engagement with two indigenous worldviews. With reference to her homeland, Aotearoa/New Zealand, the artist traces her Maori temporality and whakapapa (geneaology) back to Papatuanuku the Earth Mother and Ranginui the Sky Father, which is fundamental to the way in which Maori value land. Equally, for Aboriginal Australia, many people consider the land as “Mother, for she gives birth to us and nurtures us through our life”.

Aboriginal and Maori people have expressed and shared these ideas through oral history and language, which have been threatened (sometimes eliminated) by colonial structures, identities and formations. Walk on fallow lands II thereby draws on a Maori view of history that requires an understanding of whakapapa (genealogy) in affirming identity. The saying “I nga wa o mua,” which alludes to the past being something that lies in front of you rather than something you leave behind, and illustrates a cyclical view of history as each person is added to the whakapapa and the story moves forward, bringing the past with it.

In honouring the memories and myths of significance to the first people of Australia and presenting these through a Maori lens the artists seeks to disrupt Western narratives of place by removing dominant hierarchies. “Just as when I am walking, my feet are the waka and I carry the embodied knowledge within me.”

The walk commenced at Flagstaff Gardens in Melbourne, progressing over the Birrarung river, finishing at the Victorian College of the Arts.

For full text and response by Jen Rae, visit the link:

http://www.performingmobilities.net/symposium/passages_mobile/walk-on-fallow-lands-2/

Walk with me again

In a piece created especially for the Triggering Memory Symposium, Angela Kilford delivered a one-hour tour of Puke Ahu giving historic facts about chosen features of the small but prominent hill. The subjectivity of the tour guide was utilised to reveal the multiplicity of the landscape and to build a sense of place for symposium participants that were new to Wellington. The tour was an extension of the artist’s Walk With Me (2014) project.

The levelling of Puke Ahu
Bronwyn Holloway-Smith, Izzy O’Neill &
Aliyah Winter, Angela Kilford
7 - 21 March, 2015

 An Enjoy Gallery offsite project, The levelling of Puke Ahu explored the complex histories of conflict, labour, violence, and art that have physically and socially transformed Puke Ahu (Mt Cook). As the site underwent redevelopment for the WWI Centenary, the work of Bronwyn Holloway-Smith, Izzy O’Neill & Elijah Winter, and Angela Kilford intervened, questioned and responded to these lesser known histories.

Image by Andrew Matautia

In this public art event Walk on fallow lands, Angela Kilford presented a series of 10 guided walks exploring the city streets surrounding Toi Pōneke Gallery. Each day participants of the walks were also invited to contribute to the work unfolding in the gallery space. In this work stories made about a place or object are explored and contested.

Below is the Press release for the event.

"Toi Pōneke Press
Walk on fallow lands
Discovering how the New Zealand Company had made a promise in 1839 to set aside one tenth of all land purchases in Port Nicholson for Māori, inspired Wellington artist Angela Kilford to explore the city streets and urban plots surrounding Toi Pōneke Gallery. The colonial Government had adopted the principle initiated by the New Zealand Company but
because of the high demand for town acres, the native reserves were absorbed into the growing settlement and Port Nicholson became the bustling city we know today as Wellington.
The idea of regeneration and fallowing is explored through a series of walks, identifying and unearthing the many layers of history within the city taking in areas of Te Aro that are currently being transformed. The reasons for change in the city are many varied, however some patterns in development can be identified. By walking the same paths every day with different participants for the duration of the work, the history of the place is unravelled step by step to allow suppressed memories to emerge, while also creating new stories with participants.
Visiting sites of commercial regeneration and construction projects involving profound financial investment counters a traditional fallowing process where land is left to regenerate. The commercialisation of sites observed in the walks is then explored further in the gallery by looking at treasured objects that have also become commodified. It could be asked whether the stories we tell about an object or place need to be historically recorded in order to be relevant to our sense of place or belonging. It is this question that links the stories explored through the walks to the story unfolding in the gallery space.
Working alongside Kilford for the second time is emerging artist and photographer Elijah Winter. As well as acting as a walking and research companion, Winter will be helping to create the work within the Toi Pōneke gallery whilst Kilford is walking with participants. Walk on fallow lands is Kilford’s third public art event since completing her MFA at Massey University in 2014. Her practice seeks to investigate memory, memorialisation and the landscape. Recent projects demonstrate a keen interest in contested memories within specific sites and seek to elevate oral histories as a means of recording the past. Kilford’s exploration of myth within the construction of a national identity challenges the notion of official histories and reminds us that identity is an evolving concept."

The reclamation Walk was a performance art project created for the Performance Arcade. The guided tour series unraveled the history of Wellington’s shoreline step by step to allow suppressed memories to emerge, while also creating new stories with participants.  A Maori worldview of history requires an understanding of whakapapa (genealogy) in affirming identity. The saying “ I nga wa o mua” which alludes to the past being something that lies in front of you rather than something you leave behind illustrates a cyclical view of history and as each person is added to the whakapapa the story moves forward bringing the past with it.

Walk With Me was a performance art project that was born from an interest in memory and memorialisation. The guided tour series initiated an investigation of site that illustrates the power of the New Zealand Government to influence our national identity through the fuelling of dominant myths at the new National Memorial Park.  The project revealed the ongoing effects of colonialism and offered participants an alternative to the memory formed by the focus on New Zealand’s participation in overseas wars.