Hanging the Market         

This installation draws from Indigenous market practices across Central America, where both parcheros and market women display their goods through textiles. While parcheros often lay blankets directly on the ground, market women also suspend blankets and cloths along walls and stalls, creating vertical fields of abundance. For me, these blankets are not only display devices but expressions of lineage: I come from a long line of market women, and the market itself is a living archive of Indigenous knowledge held and transmitted through women’s labour.

This hanging blanket of earrings, much like the rest of this exhibition, follows that latter practice, asserting a market methodology rather than a vitrine-based display. At the centre sits a diptych of stamped works on black-dyed harakeke paper by Māori artist Tayla Hartemink. For Tayla, harakeke carries whakapapa through fibre, process, and repetition, holding seasonal knowledge tied to harvest, abundance, and collective survival. Positioned within the suspended blanket, the work anchors the composition while remaining in dialogue with it. Here, whakapapa meets whakapapa: harakeke paper and market blanket function as parallel genealogical infrastructures, each organising abundance and memory through use rather than containment. Together, these elements foreground Indigenous economies of presentation, where queer and women’s labour, beauty, and visibility are inseparable, and where display itself operates as a form of knowledge.