Aotearoa's Medicinal Plants as Fairies

How did this series come about?

A few months ago, I was asked to paint a mural at Coromandel Area School, collaborating with a class to create a shared vision of a magical forest. The class I worked with wanted fairies, or patupaiarehe, incorporated into it. As the class also wanted native flora and fauna woven in, I thought it would be great to create some fairies connected to our native plants and mushrooms.

As a child, I adored Shirley Barber’s fairy illustrations, The Flower Fairies by Cicely Mary Barker, and the fantasy works of Brian Froud. I hoped my mural would inspire students as much as these artists inspired me. I created a number of small paintings as concepts for the mural, one of which was a Kawakawa fairy, and this painting sparked the series.

I decided to centre my fairy series not just around native flora, but on medicinal plants like Kawakawa. I love learning about natural medicine and what I can forage in my own backyard. So many of us are raised in synthetic environments, oblivious to what is growing around us. I didn’t really know much about our native medicinal plants, so I began to do some research. An online course on the foundations of Rongoā Māori (Māori medicine) popped up, and I found it really helpful. It was facilitated by Awhi Rongoā and Tarikura from Aio the Podcast. The course delved into the tikanga of working with the plants and how to identify and safely create rongoā rākau. I began identifying some of these rākau (plants) on my bush walks and found many of them growing close to home. I harvested leaves to use as references and later brewed them into teas!

I feel that conveying these plants as beings/fairies helps remind us of their sentience, so they are not just looked at as a resource. They need to be treated with respect, and having an energetic connection with trees and plants is so good for us. Rongoā Māori offers us a lens of reciprocal, respectful, and conscious engagement with plants. It’s sad to realise how disconnected so many of us have been from this knowledge, after colonisation Rongoā Māori was actively suppressed and systematically undermined.

I've loved creating something that supports the resurgence of this knowledge. So far I have painted Kawakawa, Mānuka, Tātarāmoa, Kohekohe, Harakeke, Koromiko, Kūmarahou and Kopakopa (Plantain). I hope to keep developing this series and to exhibit the works in a way that connects viewers with these plants and Rongoā Māori. 

I am selling prints and a postcard-sized set of the eight fairies, with a write-up about their properties and identifying features on the back. I am currently on the hunt for the perfect frames for my eight originals so far, and I hope to exhibit them next year!