Artist statement
‘All prickly with crosses, all covered with inscriptions, all spaded up and shaken by countless daily burials, we are charged with the transmutation, the resurrection, the transfiguration of all things. For how can we save what is visible if not by using the language of absence, of the invisible?’—Rainer Maria Rilke
The title Thin Places reflects the ushering into my art practice of my Irish heritage and its my-thologies—particularly the idea of an invisible divider, a thin place that touches time on one side and eternity on the other. I have previously explored Māori conceptualisations of this through tactile veil works that reimagine te ārai as a fluid barrier between physical and spiritual realms. This show is my way of connecting multiple whakapapa lines through shared spiritual positions. I explore the unseen and unspoken dimensions such as time-travel and intergener-ational knowledge to examine how mythology-building can happen through material, as well as oral or written, transferral.★☆★In my teenage bedroom, at my great-grandfather Paul’s house in Liverpool, there was a small ‘memory box’, a repurposed rosary bead box containing broken treasures that had belonged to his wife, my Irish great-grandmother, Anne Murphy. Her life and subsequent death were wrapped in mystery. There was a knowledge withholding—or ‘kaiponu’, to use a Whanganui expression—around her story. The only clues I had of the woman whose ‘eyes were my eyes’ were fragments of shiny adornments and waxy pictures of unnamed yet familiar figures. I would frequently review the bitsy, sacred mess, wondering if the items were indeed precious to Anne or made precious through her absence from them.
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