Essay · The Painted Rafter

What the Soot-Black Rafters Were Trying to Tell Us

For a hundred years we read kōwhaiwhai as decoration. Stand under the heke long enough and the curling scrolls start to read as sentences.

I spent three weeks last autumn lying on my back on the floor of a borrowed wharenui near Tolaga Bay, photographing the ceiling at dawn before the carvers arrived. The kōkōwai red had gone almost brown with woodsmoke, and in that low light the scrolls seemed to move — not as ornament, but as a line of argument running rafter to rafter.

The Black Came First

The painters laid down a soot ground before anything else, because the void is where the story begins, not where it ends. Against that black, the white koru reads as the first light and the red ochre as the first blood — pigment mixed, by old accounts, with shark oil so it would hold to the timber for a century. You cannot understand the curves without first sitting with the dark they sit upon.