Description:

Piki Mai is a book written and designed with the goal of exploring rock climbing in Tangata Whenua spaces, specifically Whanganui Bay. Investigating how beneficial relationships between climbers and Iwi can be created and upheld, how history shifts the culture of Aotearoa climbing and how we guide Kaitiaki for the future. Through this, I sought to explore how rock climbing translates visually into a printed medium.

Whanganui Bay is a climbing area located on the shores of Lake Taupo on Te Maunga Hapū land. Access has only recently been granted back to the public and with this comes a sensitivity of the area and the notion that land must be respected. Piki Mai draws from my own and others perspectives to discuss and explore the history of the area, relationship between climbers and Hapū, as well as climbers' relationship with the land.

Print was chosen to allow readers to have a personable experience when engaging with the content and keep the narrative linear. While Piki Mai uses an auto-ethnographic framework in its content, it is encompassed by interviews with Te Maunga Hapū and figures within the climbing community to form its narratives. Climbing unlike mountaineering, surfing or skating has little in the way of photography-heavy coffee table style books that celebrate the aesthetic nature and cultural narratives that rock climbing presents. Most climbing print media are guidebooks and technical guides, while these are filled with technical and cultural clues they are visually unappetizing and fail to capture a deep connection to place and culture. Piki Mai was created to bridge the aforementioned gap.

The explicit goal for the editorial design of Piki Mai was to immerse a reader into the experience of rock climbing and give justice to the scale of the environment. It reads vertically allowing for spreads to showcase long rock forms as well as giving the sense that a reader is ‘ascending’ the cliff. The large scale and slightly square format of the book allows for more dynamic image compositions. Fold-out spreads are also used to convey ‘big nature’ motifs and separate themes. Tippens are used for body text, separating written and photographic narratives. Allowing readers to engage with type and image separately or together. ‘Manuka’ by Klim type foundry is used for titles and headings to convey blocky geometric forms, and body type is stepped with semi-jagged edges given the appearance of a line a climber might take. It is bound 3 ways to get the intended cartography style.

Whanganui Bay stood out as the relationships between climbers and landowners (Hapū) were different to many other climbing areas in the country where land governance is most often Private or DOC. Here climbers know that access to natural resources is directly tied to relationships built with the community, time and resources given to care for the land. This case study provides a possible model for other land access issues in which outdoor recreation can provide a sustainable resource for tangata whenua self-governance and land management.