Summaryp.Walters is a taniwha, local to the Kingdom of South Auckland and beyond, with wings and bones stretching across Aotearoa and to the islands of Tonga.
Their work reflects their dissidence to the colonial imagination and legacy of “new zealand”, and their devotion to understanding and venerating their queer and monstrous body.
Graduating in 2022 from Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland with a BFA First Class Honours, they practice collectively & individually throughout the motu & Moana; via art making, curation, exhibition making, public programming, writing, etc.
There were two overarching areas of making and research I explored during my Fale-Ship Residency -
The Written Word, or more specifically Worship of the Written Word.
The Body; or more specifically my own Body, this vessel and creature of Divine Being.
I am interested in how one can inform the other, how the former can attempt to control the latter, and how the two inevitably bleed into one within my practices.
Worship of the Written Word is one of the many characteristics of White Supremacy culture, as written by Tema Okun.
It can show up as “if it’s not in a memo, it doesn’t exist” and “if it’s not grammatically correct, it has no value” amongst other forms.
I’m suspicious of how Worship of the Written Word manifests in the Documents of our daily lives: all these papers, both physical and digital, these stored files and archives of knowledge. Knowledge of people, of places, of bodies, of lives and of deaths.
I’m compelled by the contradiction of White Supremacist culture: how the colonial nation of NZ upholds an active Worshipping practice towards the Birth Certificates, the Death Certificates, the Passports, the Contracts, the Acts, the Laws, the Receipts and the Emails, the Degrees, the Diplomas, the Prescriptions; yet continues to fail to honour the constitutional and founding document of the nation itself.
What I made in the first months of the Fale-Ship Residency and eventually presented at Enjoy Gallery in An Ethics of Witnessing (July 2025) was a body of paintings, drawings and exercises which play with my relationship to Written Text and my own ancestral relationships with Te Tiriti o Waitangi, He Whakaputanga and the Doctrine of Discovery.
Appropriated lines from the Bible, pop culture reference, spiritual + queer text and song lyrics are spliced together and appear as statements, declarations, affirmations and reminders of faith and hope.
Building my own relationship specifically with Biblical Scripture, not out of boredom or rejection but out of a hunger to understand: to intentionally choose to hear, see and feel the beauty of these words.
“FOR WE WRESTLE NOT AGAINST FLESH AND BLOOD,
BUT AGAINST PRINCIPALITIES, AGAINST THE POWERLESS, AGAINST THE RULERS, THE GOVERNORS, THE MINISTERS + THE MINISTRIES OF THE DARKNESS OF THIS WORLD, AGAINST SPIRITUAL WICKEDNESS IN HIGH PLACES.”
“BE NOT AFRAID,
NOTHING CAN DEFEAT THE SPIRIT OF THE EARTH.”
I came into this Fale-Ship with the intention of documenting my body in whatever forms it naturally manifested.
Antidotes to Worship of the Written Word can look like alternate forms of documentation. It can be valuing the different forms of knowing and expressing knowledge and communication: verbal storytelling and oral histories, image making, trace marks, photos and video, movement, meditation, dancing etc.
So, throughout the Fale-Ship Residency, I documented my body: my naked body, my sacred body, my clothed body, my showered body, my elongated body — aka my serpentine, taniwha, draconian body.
With a focus on somatic experience, stretching and mobility, I exercised knowledge of my flesh: expressing love to it, listening to what information arose. Maintaining a practice of being in my body, of feeling intentionally and listening compassionately; of movement, of silence, of stillness, of breathing, of jumping, of repetition.
Listening to my flesh and its communications was an integral part of this Fale-Ship. This remains integral to my life to this day: daily ritual of awakening and unlocking the serpent. In these moments I give gratitude to my vertebrae, to my spine, to each fibre and cell that comprises the body which defines me.
When stretching the body in Cobra pose, I feel like the Basilisk from the Chamber of Secrets when it was at peak height: my torso and upper body erect and ready to attack. I envision myself as the Great Serpent and embody its spirit. This is a normal practice for me; I’ve been embodying dinosaurs since I was four years old. Embodying new beings, new minds and creating new subjectivities and shifting consciousness is nothing new to me.
I created images of this feeling and similar feelings, to document how the body feels in certain poses, to align the spirit with an image, a body, a face which reflects it accurately.
These bony, bodily, botched, dragon taniwha serpent anti-Christ images are of my body. Of myself. Self-portraits.
