Explore the Art of Storytelling at Koekoeā Studio: Magnolia Graphic Novel

He aha te mounga e tu nei? Ko Taranaki pea.

Who is that mountain there? It is Taranaki.

This project was long-listed in the First Graphic Novel Prize with Self Made Hero Publishing and The London Comic Museum in 2023. It meant that I got invaluable feedback from industry specialists and suddenly felt part of a community of writers and drawers. It was good to attend the awards night and hear about their processes – we are each so different, yet working in the same medium.

Magnolia

In 2022 I returned to my homeland to help lead the repatriation of a family heirloom back to the tribe that had gifted it to our ancestor. It was the culmination of research I started 26 years ago. This event was a salve for the years of desiring reconnection with a country and a culture I felt cut off from. I started to explore what this grief is and what identity and belonging can be – what it is coming to mean for me.

Magnolia is the result. It is fiction, but based on real events. Why fiction? Because fiction is a place where I can explore and make sense of my own feelings and weave together my own ancestors’ real experiences, true historical events and our universal desire to find belonging.

The Storyline

At the turn of the 20th Century, 11 year old Birdie, a child of a Scots mother and a Chinese father, finds herself in a small, predominantly Māori settlement – people thrown together by the forces of migration and colonisation. There she meets and slowly befriends a broken man, her teacher and discovers a broken heirloom, cast away. Both man and heirloom are witnesses to a violent and troubled past, but both uncover their own pathway home and to healing.

2023 Pop-up installation of GN in Progress

I chose to share an iteration of this work with the public as part of the July Open Studios of Cambridge, UK.