PartnersJuly 13, 2023

Emiko Sheehan makes time to create

Guest writer

From poetry to weaving, printing, video and drawing, there’s not many disciplines artist Emiko Sheehan hasn’t dipped her toes into. In the fourth instalment of our Art Work series, she talks about using art as a way to connect.

Emiko Sheehan (Waikato, Tūwharetoa, Raukawa, Ngāti Tahu–Ngāti Whaoa) is a multidisciplinary artist who has worked with video, drawing, muka and poetry. Her work explores ways to reconnect with whakapapa and whenua. She is one of 10 creative enablers selected for Creative Waikato’s first artist-in-residency programme Whiria te Tāngata.

The admin

On Monday my mum is often free so she can take my daughter for a couple of hours and then I’ll try and smash out my emails. Me and my partner’s money is in a small business that we run – he does film work, I do art stuff and it all just goes into the one account and we pay ourselves a wage from that. I do admin on that, and try to do taxes, which I’m learning.

Running a business is really cool, and hard if you don’t know about it. I feel like I’m slowly understanding how to work with money and do all of that.

Tuesday is Wāwāhi Tahā class, and my Te Reo class is Wednesday. I’m usually inspired from the day before, to go get materials or work on art, then try to get some more admin done. While it slows down, by the end of the week I’m tired, I’m like “I don’t care, we’re just going to the park all day. We’re gonna go to the beach.”

How having a baby changes things

We moved out of Tāmaki during that big lockdown and ran away to the Waikato to live with my partner’s sister out in Te Aroha in a yurt for a bit. It was a little bit hectic going completely off the grid and also having a baby at the same time.

I feel like since then, and since having a baby, I’ve restarted again with my arts practice. All my ideas have changed, my thinking has changed, and my perspective has changed so I feel like it’s been a little reset button on my work. I feel like at night when I’m doing printmaking and stuff, I don’t have these expectations on myself of what I want, so it’s just free playing for me, which I love.

I don’t know what I was doing before I had a baby. I had so much time and it would take me ages to make anything. Now, it’s so hard because it takes my brain a little while to get in and actually focus. With creative work, if I have something set up, and my daughter is entertained, I can just jump in and out of that space way easier because I’m way more enthused to do it and I’m way more into it.

But it’s the actual making, that’s what I love doing.

Working at night

Mostly I try to do the boring stuff during the day, the emails and the house cleaning and try to leave that space for actual art making at night.

I’ll have my daughter and depending on how the night before went, I’ll either sleep with her when she sleeps during the day or put her to bed, and then after she goes to bed, whatever is urgent, whatever needs work on the most gets my attention. I might stay up until like 2am working on something, but it’ll alternate. If I stay up until 2am one night, the next night I have to go to sleep early.

That’s my time – at night – when I get to sit down, sometimes I’ll have a sneaky vape and beer and I’ll sit there and I’ll enjoy that. I’ve also enrolled in Te Wananga o Aotearoa for a raranga paper so I’ll be working on whatever project I have going on – for that course.

I really treasure it now – that time. I don’t get much time to myself, so when I do get that time to create, I’m right in there.

Teaching mahi

So Monday is when I’ll do admin, but also get any materials or prep that I need for my class that I run on Tuesday for Whiria te Tāngata. It’s called Wāwāhi Tahā and it’s a māmās and babies art collective – all focused around giving the māmā this time to create and commune with each other, talk about our tamariki and talk about any creative ideas they have.

I try to, as much as I can, like, take their babies off their hands so they can focus on creating. Or some weeks it’s for the babies, so we’ll set up activities and create with them. That’s part of the philosophy, that having our babies around those creative environments to build their creativity, to build their thinking and how they’re brought up in the world, having them in those environments to uplift their mana and tapu.

That takes roughly 20 hours a week, and I’ll also do my own personal research for what I wanna do in each class. At the moment what I’ve done is try to change up the activity every week or every couple of weeks so I give all the different māmā experiences with all the different materials, and seeing what kind of art medium they might be into, or what they like. We’ve done painting, and drawing, we’ve done textile based works, we’ve done clay mahi and printmaking.

I’ve also done other planning of things that I want to do with them. I want to celebrate each seasonal change, so just doing research around the different seasonal celebrations or ceremonies that Māori did. For Matariki, I’ve booked out my marae down in Te Kuiti and planned what we’re gonna do there and hopefully have a little noho and stay there for a few nights.

It’s fun work!

What I’m working on

I’ve been enjoying doing a little bit of printmaking. I’m really excited to get into the whatu work, which is muka extraction of the harakeke. I’ve been learning raranga and other whakairo weaving techniques just to wait for the right season to harvest for muka, and I’m excited to get back into that.

I’ve made a few muka sculptural pieces before, and I really want to make more of those. But I’ve just got to get the muka, and do the prep, which takes the longest! I’ve also been trying to go through some of my old writing and poetry and rewrite some of those ideas, because I reread some of my stuff lately and it’s all these really cool ideas that I had, but they were all before I had a baby as well, and I’ve grown in my perspective since writing those.

I’ve really liked doing this mahi with Wāwāhi Tahā, and experimenting with all these different mediums again, so I’m dabbling a little bit all over the place, which is real fun, I feel like a baby artist.

What I want to do is start moving from activities each week, to working as a group collectively to make bigger cohesive pieces together. I know there’s a few other māmā who would be keen on that, and they’ve got great ideas as well. But because we don’t have a lot of time it’s hard to create a full body of work or something, so I wanna bring us all in together and bring our ideas together.

We work so well, we bounce off each other and it’s a really lovely group of people that have decided to come. I have a couple of friends from Tāmaki that come down on a Tuesday as well. That’s commitment.

The importance of support

Creative Waikato (who run the groundbreaking Whiria te Tangata programme, which provides artists a full-time stipend, mentorship and other support) have been really great. Between Jeremy (Mayall) and Leiafa (Wilson) there’s a lot of knowledge, and there’s a bit of a kind of tuakana-teina thing, so we’re all matched up with a mentor. Mine is Regan Balzer, she’s a painter. Beautiful, beautiful painter.

I get really inspired when I talk to other artists and especially when I like their work and their mahi. At the moment I get inspired by other Māori artists that are weaving their art practice and their Māoritanga together and killing it. At my last meeting with Creative Waikato we were talking to Melanie Baldwin (curator of Hoea! Gallery) over on the coast and I was just like, “You’re cool, I wanna hang out with you!”

Creative Waikato’s been really good to put me in touch with these other artists and really supportive around the funding side and making sure that we don’t miss out on any of the money that we’re supposed to be getting. They’re really keen to be able to pay artists to be artists.

But it’s my tane, my friends and my whānau, I couldn’t do it without all the endless support and aroha I get from my community.

Being a full-time artist

This is the first time I’ve ever been kind of paid, or “artist” has been my main job, it’s always been on the side for me. I’m learning now about that hustle and how important it is to make these connections with other people.

I feel like I’ve got a bit more of a drive now, because I want this to be my main job now, apart from looking after my daughter, that’s my “main” job. Having a baby has created this extra drive that I want to be an example for her, I want to make sure that we are living a healthy balanced life as well, you know making sure we get that sleep and we’re eating nice healthy foods and she sees me being happy.

And I’m really happy when I’m creating and making stuff.

– As told to Sam Brooks.

Keep going!

Image: Archi Banal

PartnersJuly 12, 2023

The power meter helping you lower your carbon emissions

Catherine McGregor

Contributing writer

Image: Archi Banal

Off-peak electricity is often greener and more affordable due to lower demand. A new Green Meter by Electric Kiwi shows consumers just how green their power is.

By now, most of us know the drill. Faced with the double-whammy of chilly winter temperatures and a skyrocketing cost of living, we’re eking out extra savings on our power bills by moving our electricity usage to times of day when prices are lower. If you’ve ever set yourself a mid-evening reminder to start the washing machine, run a bath, or plug in the EV, you’re among the hundreds of thousands of Kiwis regularly “load shifting” to take advantage of cheaper off-peak electricity on a time-of-use plan.

It’s fairly widely understood that when there’s a lot of demand on the electricity grid – at breakfast time, for example, or when people are getting home from work – electricity is more expensive to generate. But fewer of us realise that the CO2 emissions of our electricity supply are also subject to peaks and troughs. That’s why Electric Kiwi built the Green Meter, a tool that helps consumers understand the predicted “greenness” of their electricity usage at any given time.

A wind turbine at Te Apiti wind farm in Manawatu Gorge (Image: PETER PARKS/AFP/Getty Images)

Using recent emissions data, the Green Meter produces a constantly updated CO2 forecast for the Aotearoa electricity grid. Carbon emissions are ranked from “Betterest” (less than 50 tonnes of CO2/half hour) to “Worstest” (a scary 400+ tonnes of CO2 produced every half hour), with “Goodish” and “Okayish” somewhere in the middle. There’s also a Carbon Insights graph showing actual average emissions for the last few months, plus forecast data for the next few days. Just like with a weather report, the short-term forecast is very accurate; the longer range one a little less so.

Peak carbon emissions often happen in tandem with peak demand on the grid. On a cold winter’s night, when most people are at home with the heating on, our renewable electricity sources (hydro, geothermal and wind) are less able to keep up with demand, and fossil fuel generation (e.g. coal) has to be called into service. But that’s far from the full story, according to Andy Cooper, Electric Kiwi’s chief customer officer. There’s also the supply side to think about. “Cold nights tend not to be a very good time for wind or solar energy” he says, “and while the lakes are full at the moment, when our water levels are low that’s also a worse time for carbon emissions.” Higher than usual emissions from electricity generation can be an issue in both summer and winter, and at any time of the day.

As the country moves into its electrified future, concepts like load shifting and emissions monitoring are only going to become more important. The electric vehicle revolution is an unprecedented opportunity to “swap dirty, imported fuels for clean, homemade ones”, Cooper says. But the electrification of our vehicle fleet is also going to put a huge strain on the national grid, and the sooner the potential impacts are put on people’s radars, the better. “We need financial incentives, we need good information and we definitely need some clever technology to help consumers do load shifting at scale,” he says. “Because the cost of not doing that is that our networks probably won’t cope and our costs will skyrocket.”

Creating a Green Meter is part of the effort to get consumers thinking about the carbon footprint of their electricity usage, and how small adjustments can make a big difference. Given that New Zealand’s energy supply is already predominantly renewable, load shifting is by far the best thing you can do to lower your electricity emissions further, Cooper says. He’s concerned that power companies selling “green certified” electricity are confusing the issue. “We’ve potentially got the most engaged customers in the country thinking that they should change power companies rather than change behaviour – in my opinion those companies need to have a good hard look at themselves.”

The Green Meter is also laying the groundwork for an electricity innovation that hasn’t had as much attention as EVs, but could prove just as impactful. Within the next year or two, with the help of smart home technology, electricity suppliers like Electric Kiwi will be able to manage the supply of electricity to customers’ homes, allowing water heaters, EVs and other electricity-hungry devices to be charged at the lowest possible price and with the least impact on the climate. It’ll all be automated on the customer’s behalf. “I think ultimately that always proves to be the most successful option,” says Cooper. “The less people need to do, the better.”

And that’s where the Green Meter comes in. “We want more and more people to think about this stuff so that, as those automations come along, they’ll understand what’s going on and be ready to take part in those new propositions that make life easier, make things cheaper and help us meet our climate goals. So it’s a bit of a win-win.”

Because it’s a forecast of the entire electrical grid’s emissions, the Green Meter is relevant to every electricity consumer, whether they’re an Electric Kiwi customer or not. Why not wall it off? “I think when you’re in an industry like ours, you have a pretty big social responsibility to do the right thing for the country, rather than yourself,” says Cooper, who’s quick to admit that encouraging load shifting makes good business sense too. Anything that flattens electricity demand now helps reduce the need for expensive new electricity generation infrastructure in the future.

If you’re on a time-of-use electricity plan, you already know the financial benefits of shifting your power use to times of day when demand is lower, and when fossil fuel-powered generation is likely lower too. But load shifting is about a lot more than just the effect on your back pocket – it’s also better for the environment, and for the health of the electricity grid as a whole. When you put it like that, having your bath an hour later seems a small price to pay.