Ngā mihi mahana kia koutou.

Warm greetings. I was born in the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand, under the mountain Pirongia, and spent my childhood by the Waipa and Waikato tumbling waterways, fungi, flora, fish and bird life and often with grandparents in Te Papa, Tauranga Moana. I am of the Celtic people, with a whakapapa weaving me within the reciprocity of our Irish clan Claddagh and the Scottish clan of Fraser Kennedy.

My family and kin are Simmons – Hansen. From the narrative approaches shared from nuns in my early Irish Catholic childhood I am drawn to collaborative values-based creative approaches to this extraordinary landscape of belonging and reciprocity, of mana-dignity and power in our stories and art. These fuel my art through which I most often work exploring birdlife in paint in inks and acrylics; I write of mythopoetic worlds as Tangata Te Tiriti.

In walking the land, the land speaks. In early morning I walk to the estuary where guardians of this space the stingray touch the stillness of these waters. For how I/we/they navigate and remember belonging in multiple landscapes, requires that prose and imagery which speak to the thresholds for reimagining.