Essay
Weaving the Weather
Mary Adeosun
When Dahlina (Ina) Taueu was a child, her Nana would call her indoors from playing to sit beside her and weave. At the time, it felt like a disruption with childhood calling out from the yard, while Nana insisted that someone in the family needed to carry on the practice. “When I’m seven feet under,” her Nana once said, “it’ll go with me.”
That early tension between play and responsibility is something Ina now looks back on with tenderness. Her weaving practice has become a place of grounding, and a way to honour her Nana’s insistence. It’s where her hands remember. For Ina, the mat became more than an object; it became a map. A place to return to.
Across six winter Saturdays, Ina shared that space of return with others. Weaving the Weather was a workshop series that welcomed adults of all backgrounds to learn the Niuean art of lalaga (weaving). Held at Gus Fisher Gallery as part of the public programme for the exhibition Tala o le tau, these sessions invited people into conversation with natural materials, memory and each other.
Each week brought in a mixture of first-timers, long-time creatives and those reconnecting with their island heritage. While Ina guided the technical side of weaving, the room itself allowed for something softer: a kind of quiet transformation. Participants spoke about aunties and grandmothers who wove and shared how those people were no longer around. They worked with their hands and left with something held, something learnt, something remembered.
Ina’s own weaving journey was reignited during the Corona-virus lockdown period in Aotearoa. After experiencing a creative block, she was invited to her Nana’s house, where she joined her aunties in weaving. This gathering, after so much isolation, was deeply healing. Weaving became a ritual of reconnection to family, to culture and to herself. It also created a path forward. Since then, Ina has spent years refining her weaving practice, always returning to her Nana’s ethos of teaching as a form of love. She has exhibited her work, pursued study, and remained devoted to learning her language alongside her craft.
In Weaving the Weather, participants created small mats that now surround one large central mat made by Ina. The layout draws from imagery of cyclones both in motion and meaning. The large mat symbolises the Pacific Ocean, holding space for its vastness, its currents, and its interconnectedness. The smaller mats, each one unique, represent the many islands that dot the Moana. Together they echo the idea that identity, like weather, is collective and shifting. Each woven mat holds a moment, a person, a story.
The project took inspiration from Tala o le tau and Yuki Kihara’s embroidered pandanus mats created with women from the Moata’a Aualuma Community in Sāmoa. Like Kihara, Ina honours the role of women’s collective labour in shaping knowledge systems across time. Both works remind us that mat-making isn’t just about the end product, it’s about the people who gather to make it.
Many participants in the workshop had never woven before. For some, it was an act of reclaiming what was lost or not passed down. For others, it was an entry point into another way of relating to Pacific culture through practice and care. That’s what made the workshops powerful: they didn’t centre expertise, they centred generosity.
As Ina taught others to weave, she found herself stepping into her Nana’s shoes by standing in the same educator role her grandmother once held. “It feels cyclical,” she said. Her Nana used to teach weaving to palagi (foreigners) who visited Niue. Now, in her twenties, Ina does the same in Aotearoa. Her hope is that young Niueans feel empowered to reconnect with their elders and the artforms that sit in their family lines. “Be annoying,” she laughed, “ask questions, make them show you.”
From a gallery perspective, projects like Weaving the Weather help to expand upon how creative practice may be understood. They move beyond the object and into the process of the people who hold the tools, who sit in circles, who share fruit and tea, and thread meaning through fibre. These workshops remind us that the mat is not just a surface but a story. Not just craft but culture. As Susan Ballard writes in Art and Nature in the Anthropocene,1 art in our time can also be a form of “planetary aesthetics”— a way to witness and respond to the forces that shape our world. These forces include climate and culture, colonial disruption and diasporic healing.
The materiality of the work also speaks volumes. Ina and the group used a mix of natural and recycled materials, including raffia and coconut fibre. This choice reflected both environmental awareness, accessibility and connected to historical forms of Pacific creativity where resourcefulness and adaptation are essential.
My role as Ina’s assistant throughout this project was grounded in our friendship. We’ve spent years weaving and braiding together. Me with African braiding, her with Niuean lalaga. These shared acts, while culturally distinct, overlap in their reverence for ancestry, ritual and care. Sitting in these workshops, watching participants quietly begin to shape something with their hands, reminded me of how knowledge is held in the body. How it travels. How it lives on.
I write this as the final session of Weaving the Weather approaches and participants are now shaping the last of their mats for exhibition. There’s been a steady shift in the room each week. What began with quiet uncertainty has grown into shared rhythm and confidence. Some who were new to weaving now offer guidance to others, and the gallery space itself has transformed from something formal into a space of learning, warmth and cultural exchange.
Soon, the mats will hang in the corridor. Together they will speak not only to Pacific weather systems, but to Pacific systems of knowledge. They hold the mana of the artist, the trust and effort of the participants, and the quiet beauty that emerges when people gather to make something with care.
This project has been generously supported by the Creative Communities Scheme, funded by Creative NZ and delivered in partnership with Auckland Council.
1 Ballard, Susan. Art and Nature in the Anthropocene: Planetary Aesthetics. 1st ed. vol. 1. New York: Routledge, 2021.

Gus Fisher Gallery
74 Shortland Street
Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland Central 1010
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10am – 5pm
Saturdays:
10am – 4pm