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Andrea Hotere
Pitts, P., & Hotere, A. (2017). Undreamed of...50 Years (First, pp. 125–125). Otago University Press. Reprinted with the permission of the publishers.
Great Barrier Island is the turangawaewae of Shona Rapira-Davies and she still feels the pull home. ‘I do mourn not being there.’
Rapira-Davies, of Ngāti Wai, lived on the island with her six brothers and sisters until she was seven. 'I always wanting to make art.’ Her father Pita Hono Pita Kino Davies, was a whaler, but this work ended in the 1950s. ‘The freedom there is amazing. There’s still that element of wild and free. You can see it in the kids, the way they are in the water. It was a real body blow to come back to the mainland.’
She attended Epsom Girls’ Grammar School in Auckland, where she studied art. The character embodied in the teachers at the school impressed on her that women could do anything: ‘We were encouraged to be the best, academically, in creative arts and in sports.’ Expectations of women in wider society, however, were more constricting.