By Margie Beautrais, Educator
It’s Spring-time and it’s time to get all the summer crops planted. Over the last two weeks, I’ve been distributing gourd seeds to schools and preschools, so all around our region people will be growing gourd plants, drying gourd fruit, and hopefully, making something wonderful. This initiative is inspired by Whanganui artists, Marty and Marilyn Vreede, who planted the “seed” of the idea.
To make sure we had some dried gourds ready to use for Museum education programmes, I grew a crop of gourds during last summer. These are now gradually drying in various locations at home and at the Museum, as I experiment to find out which drying method works the best. Knowing more about the long process involved in producing dried gourds ready to use, has given me a much greater respect for all the gourds in the Museum collection.
These include Nigerian artworks made from fragments of gourd cut into a variety of shapes including fish, birds and leopards. The surfaces are mostly brightly painted, with carved, unpainted details and fret-work patterns cut into many of them.
In the Pacific collection are tiny and delicate containers, some painted, some lightly inscribed with patterns, and mostly retaining the natural brown colour of the gourd. There’s also an assortment of long narrow gourds for enclosing and covering part of an adult male.
In our Education collection are musical instruments made from gourds, painted and decorated with traditional kowhaiwhai designs. There are also replica water containers, made as props for the movie River Queen, each one suspended in a harakeke (flax) net.
The most amazing gourds are the tahā huahua in the Māori collection. These giant hue (gourds) were grown and crafted into containers for preserving meat. Some are still fitted with their original carved wooden neck, and enclosed in woven flax kete. Smaller hue or ipu, have a single hole for filling with water, and no other adornment or decoration.
For each of these artefacts, a year of work was invested before the final product was made or used. It takes a summer to grow the gourds, and a winter to dry the mature fruit.
In one year from now, gourds grown this coming summer will be dried and ready to use for the end product, whatever that may be. I look forward to enjoying the artistic creations produced by people from around this region. I’m sure there will be some gorgeous gourds.
So now’s the time to plant those seeds!
To follow Margie's progress on the gourds make sure to keep an eye on her blog
