AUT Prize presentation: Shaping kumika, Heidi Henshaw
Heidi Henshaw is the recipient of the Artspace Aotearoa 2025 AUT Prize for Critical Rigor. As part of the award, she was invited to develop a presentation that expands on the research and conceptual ideas informing her practice. Presented in the Reading Room during CRIT: Art learning since 1987, Shaping kumika explores storytelling, place, and cultural memory through sculpture, critical anthropological research, and Melanesian oral traditions.
Artist statement
I have hand-sculpted three clay fruits that represent the kumika from a Wamiran legend. More commonly known as noni, these fruits have a distinctive taste, which I have been warned is unpleasant. Although I have not yet encountered this fruit, I have carved my own versions to bind them to the tale of Tamodukorokoro. A story passed on from my mum and later reiterated through the research conducted by American anthropologist Miriam Kahn.
Kahn carried out ethnographic research in the village of Wamira, Papua New Guinea, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During her stay, she resided with my relatives while determining and negotiating definitions of place as an outsider to Wamira. At this time, my mum was schooling in Dogura, and on the weekends would walk to Wamira to stay with her grandmother, my noiu Sybil. Unbeknownst to my mum, the American woman living with Aunty Alice would later publish a photo of noiu Sybil in the book, Senses of Place (1996), alongside other treasures of our familial history.1
In Wamira, Kahn studied Melanesian methods of storytelling, such as oral narratives being anchored to physical landmarks. These physical landforms not only enforce the credibility of past events but also reveal that the landscape is not just a backdrop for events, but an active shaper of our identity and memory.2 She explored this concept through the tale of Tamodukorokoro, a creature that was part man and part spirit. Now he is a large stone that sits on Fergusson Island. His stone can be seen beyond the bay of Wamira, sitting between the stones of his two wives. All three faced away from Wamira, shunning the place that tried to destroy Tamodukorokoro by means of roasted kumika.3
The story of Tamodukorokoro provides an explanation for the environment of Wamira. The land is scaly, like the roasted kumika, and hot as the rock hurled into the mouth of the beast. Before the monster left, the soil was fertile, but after his absence, the soil filled with rocks. The landscape is a constant reminder of a rich shared history and an encoded moral lesson about how we should treat
others. For those of us outside of Wamira, much context is missed without the spatial understanding of how Tamodukorokoro’s tale unfolded. In making my own clay kumika, I present fragments of a story that has been removed from its environment. I shape my own visual reminders of a history embedded in a land close to my ancestors but far from me.
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Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, eds., Senses of Place (School of American Research, 1996). 2 Miriam Kahn, “Stone-Faced Ancestors: The Spatial Anchoring of Myth in Wamira, Papua New Guinea,” Ethnology 29, no. 1 (1990): 5. ↩
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Miriam Kahn, “Your Place and Mine: Sharing Emotional Landscapes in Wamira, Papua New Guinea,” in Senses of Place (School of American Research, 1996), 174. ↩
Biography
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Heidi Henshaw is a sculptural artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Drawing on her Papua New Guinean heritage, she investigates familial histories through anthropological records and Melanesian oral traditions. Henshaw’s clay constructions navigate the intersections of these narratives to expand her knowledge of cultural identity and history. She holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Auckland University of Technology.