The Bird Woman and the Becoming of THRESHOLD

Karen Hansen-Daniels

(Photography and Accessories: Karen Hansen / THRESHOLD | Model: Kaitlyn Roberts | Location: Te Arikiroa

I was six years old when I first began collecting feathers from geothermal land. Mum and I were living in the caretaker’s cottage at Hell’s Gate, on the Ruahine Geothermal Field, with a sulphur mountain in our backyard and peacocks and guinea fowl wandering freely around us. It was an extraordinary place to grow up, although at the time, it was simply my world. Feathers were part of that world, beautiful little treasures scattered across the volcanic earth, waiting to be found.

I had no idea then how deeply those early experiences would weave themselves through my life as an artist, or that nearly forty years later I would be returning to the same relationship between feathers, sulphur and the living earth, also discovering during this journey, the the idea of Ruahine itself means a woman who works on the THRESHOLD of spaces and spirit. The in-between.

In 2010, I created my first contemporary jewellery collection, making elaborate cuffs from guinea fowl feathers and crystal beads. One of those pieces found its way onto the wrist of Miss Inked Australia, appearing in Inked Magazine AU/NZ and Inked Girls in 2011. It was an exciting beginning, and looking back now, I can see the earliest expressions of ideas that have continued to find their way into my work.

(IMAGE: INKED MAGAZINE DEC 2010. Guinea Fowl Feather and Crystal Cuff, Karen Hansen)

When I went to art school in 2017, birds began appearing in my sculpture in quite different ways. I created Tauhou, meaning 'the stranger', an assemblage doll incorporating the taxidermied body of a little waxeye who had flown into my window and died. There were other sculptural works that year involving bird figures, including an archaeological crown (MEMORY) that carried something of the ancient Minoan Bird Goddess traditions, and my growing fascination with the Sacred Feminine and the power of the goddess in pre-Classical cultures.

I was interested in what these figures might have represented to the people who made and lived with them, and why the relationship between women, birds and the spirit world seemed to appear so persistently across different cultures and times.

In 2018, I began exploring feathers as material in their own right, studying the intricate patterns, iridescent colours and textures, and translating them into printed editions. I experimented with coating feathers in resin, changing their surfaces and pushing at the boundaries between natural material and technology. At the time, these experiments felt like separate investigations, but they were taking me closer to the processes I work with today.

Then, in 2019, I created Oracle, a sculptural, winged and distorted Goddess figure incorporating the taxidermied head of a New Zealand forest hawk that I had found on a rural driveway. She was a powerful presence. I later translated her into a digital print called WARRIOR, working in red ochre, a colour that would become increasingly significant in my visual language.

(Image: WARRIOR (2019) Karen Hansen)

The Bird Woman was finding her way through my work long before I understood where she was leading me.

And then came Kurangaituku.

In 2022, I was commissioned by a local marae to create a body artwork embodying Kurangaituku, the extraordinary Bird Woman of Te Arawa pūrākau. I began gathering stories about her, and discovered that there were different tellings, with different understandings of who she was and what had happened to her.

The version that spoke most deeply to me was the one in which Kurangaituku was a fierce protector of the natural world, a dark feminine kaitiaki whose territory was entered by a warrior named Hatupatu.

In this telling, Hatupatu was taking from her domain, yet when he needed shelter, she took him in. He repaid her hospitality by killing her birds, stealing her cloak and fleeing.

Kurangaituku pursued him across the land.

Hatupatu called upon the rock to open and conceal him, and the earth gave him shelter. Kurangaituku clawed and scraped at the stone, leaving deep gouges in her determination to reach him. I have visited that rock myself, and seen the marks across its surface.

Eventually, believing she had gone, Hatupatu emerged. But she had been waiting.

She chased him onward into the geothermal landscape of Whakarewarewa, where she met her death in a boiling mud pool.

Hatupatu is celebrated as the hero in many tellings of this story, and Kurangaituku cast as the monster. But the more I sat with her story, the more troubled I became by that interpretation. Here was a woman who protected her territory and the creatures within it, who offered shelter to a stranger, and whose hospitality was repaid with violence and theft.

I found myself wondering who the monster really was.

As I began the work of embodying Kurangaituku, I entered into a deeply personal relationship with her presence and energy. I wanted to understand her through my hands and through the materials themselves, and what emerged changed the way I have worked with feathers ever since.

She told me that every feather must be gathered from the land. Never bought.

She drew my attention to the feathers I might once have passed over. The broken ones, the weathered and distressed ones lying at swamp edges, caught amongst grasses, or resting in those overlooked spaces between things. I began to recognise a different kind of beauty in them, and to understand that their histories, their encounters with weather, water, earth and time, were already part of what they carried.

She also showed me the extraordinary power of repetitive making with the hands. The gathering, preparing, weaving and binding of materials became a doorway into the spirit realm, a way of entering communion through the physical act of making. In many ways, she was reminding me of something I already knew, but giving me a much deeper, felt understanding of it.

In 2023, I brought this relationship into physical form through Daughter of Punga, my living sculptural embodiment of Kurangaituku, created for Waitangi Rotorua.

(Image: Daughter of Punga (2023) Karen Hansen. Model: Connie Takarangi)

I have never stopped gathering feathers from the land.

They arrive slowly, as and when I encounter them. Some are almost perfect, others are torn, worn or barely holding together. I don't purchase feathers for my artwork now. Their gathering is part of the practice, and the place they come from matters just as much as the feather itself.

And now, in 2026, there is THRESHOLD.

My first collection of wearable geothermal sculpture has brought me back to the volcanic landscape of my childhood, and to the feathers that first fascinated me as a little girl living beneath a sulphur mountain. One of the first releases, naturally developed markings within the fumarole reminicent of those peacocks!

Through my ongoing Geothermal Index practice at Te Arikiroa, I have developed a process of preserving found feathers in electroplated copper, then offering them into the fumaroles of the active volcano beneath Rotorua. Heat, steam, sulphur, time and mineral / hydrothermal chemistry transform their surfaces, leaving extraordinary colours and patinas that carry the physical record of their encounter with the land.

(Image: Large Geothermal Feather Necklace reminiscent of Peacock (2026) Karen Hansen |  THRESHOLD)

The feathers are still gathered slowly, one by one. I prepare them with my hands, translate their delicate structures into metal, and return them to the volcanic earth to undergo another transformation. Some (The exhibition collection) are suspended from muka harakeke that I have prepared and twisted by hand from the land i walk in relationship with, bringing the rhythm of fibre work and the spaces between into the making as Ruahine.

(Image: Photography and Accessories - Karen Hansen | THRESHOLD Model: Kaityln Roberts | Te Arikiroa)

There is so much of my history present in these little sculptures. The feather cuffs of 2010, the Bird Goddess figures of art school, my explorations of natural materials and technology, the fierce presence of Oracle, and the teachings I received through my encounter with Kurangaituku.

I think about that little girl at Hell's Gate, gathering feathers amongst the sulphur and steam, and how many times I have returned to the same materials through different stages of my life. Each return has brought a deeper understanding, and new ways of working with the things that have always called to me.

Kurangaituku is an ancestor of THRESHOLD. Her presence lives in the way I gather, the way I make, and the relationship I hold with the natural world.

I feel that connection particularly strongly when I find a feather lying damaged at the edge of the geothermal wetlands. Something another person might walk straight past can become the beginning of an extraordinary journey through my hands and the living volcanic earth.

And I love that, after all these years, the feathers are still teaching me. These things are cyclical, and work in spirals of experience and deeper layers of understandings. I'm here for it!

Shop the THRESHOLD retail collection here: THRESHOLD (2026) Karen Hansen Art