I O E A U

Ko tā te tārai matapaia a Dorothy Waetford he whakaatu i ngā oropuare e rima o te reo Māori me te tuhinga o aua oropuare ki te arapū Rōmana. He reo kūoro-tuwhera te reo Māori, e mutu ai ngā kūoro katoa ki te oropuare – kei te tautuhia ngā oro reo e ēnei oropuare.

E ai ki a Waetford:

Ko tāku maumaharatanga tuatahi tonu mō te whakaaro o *IOEAU* he whakatakoto i taua ariā ki mua i te aroaro o tō mātou rōpū i tētahi wānanga i te marae o Whakapara i ngā tau whakamutunga o 1990, e Manu Korewha. I taua wā rā, i tēnei wā tonu, koia tētahi huarahi ki te whakakore i te koroniaratanga, ki te wero i ngā whakapuakitanga mō te hanganga o te ao, ki te kite i ngā mana nui e huna nei ki reira.

Dorothy Waetford’s ceramic sculpture shows the five vowels of te reo Māori (the Māori language) and the Roman alphabet used to write them. Māori is an open-syllable language in which all syllables end in a vowel – so these vowels punctuate the sounds of the language.

Waetford comments:

My earliest memory about the whakaaro [plan] of *IOEAU* was introduced to a group of us during wānanga [teaching] at Whakapara marae in the late 1990s by Manu Korewha. For me it was then and still is now, an instrument of decolonisation, questioning everyday assumptions about ways in which the world is constructed, and the subtle power relations that lie there within.

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