FINEARTS 241 : Contemporary Practices: Culture and Place

This woven rope web is a visual exploration of whakapapa—the Māori concept of genealogy and ancestral connection—created during my time as an international student at the University of Auckland. I come from rural Iowa, where I grew up on a small hobby farm, and currently study International Studies at the University of Iowa. My family’s roots reach across the United States, including ancestors among the first European settlers—like Miles Standish, the first sheriff of the colonies. Despite this deep history, I’ve always been struck by how much cultural knowledge was lost once my family immigrated. Traditions, languages, and identities disappeared within a few generations, leaving behind gaps that I’ve long felt but couldn’t always articulate—until I encountered the idea of whakapapa.

The rope web is formed in a circle, symbolizing the ongoing, interconnected nature of ancestry. There are 155 openings in the web, representing the 155 ancestors I’ve been able to trace up to my 6th great-grandparents—a total that should number 256. The remaining 101 are marked by larger gaps, symbolizing lost stories and silenced names. I used cotton rope, a nod to the painting canvases used by my family of landscape artists, and hand-painted and dyed it with watercolor in five colors based on ancestral birthplaces. White represents American-born ancestors, and the other colors fade gradually as the lineage extends outward—demonstrating both generational distance and the dimming clarity of origin over time. While some colors glow near the center, others fade into near-invisibility, just as certain branches of my family tree have become unreachable.

This work also challenges how we think about lineage and responsibility. As an American, my history is entangled with colonization and displacement, yet the colonizing ancestors in my family tree are now distant—12 generations or more removed. The further I looked, the more abstract and tangled these relationships became. This web only maps up to my 6th great-grandparents, and even then, I could only find about 60% of them. Going further would make the structure too thin and complex to hold together—visually echoing how fragile and fragmented our understanding of the past becomes. This piece is both a meditation on what has been preserved and a confrontation with what has been lost, asking viewers to reflect on their own histories, inherited silences, and how cultural identity both endures and fades over time.

This was the starting diagram I used to create my work. This was based off of the ancestry.com arch graph for showing family but instead of leaving the bottom open as an arch I joined both sides and used it as a guide for a crochet project. 

The blue represents fathers, the pink represents mothers, and I am in the center. This was the base diagram I manipulated to represent my family. 

This is what my ancestry chart looked like based off of birthplaces of my ancestors. I had always been told growing up that my moms side was related to the first settlers of the British colonies in America. With my moms help we traced our lineage using ancestry all the way back to the 1600's, twelve generations of grandparents. In my work I was only able to weave up to my sixth great grandparents and this diagram above was made for mapping up to the fourth great grandparents. In total I mapped 155 direct ancestors, while 40% of my ancestry is still missing.