This installation is part of a larger project called Nirun, the Thai word for eternal – a timespan that connects ancient histories and future possibilities. In it, Sorawit Songsataya collapses the distances between times and places, imagining layered relationships between materials and species, learning and loss, home and elsewhere. Ōamaru limestone pillars and basins hold beeswax and resin pools that preserve remnants of Te Waipounamu South Island ecologies – shells, dried plant matter – as well as memories from Aotearoa and Songsataya’s homeland, Thailand, contained in fruit peels, synthetic nails and eyelashes and kōwhai petals gathered near their studio. Both wax and limestone are produced through the energy of other life forms: bees, and the calcified remains of tiny organisms that have broken down over eons. As Songsataya reminds us, this landscape is teeming and shifting, and is rich with the pūrākau of takata whenua.

Geological timescales might be immense, but they can also be personal, recognising how knowledge and belonging are cyclical too – as one environment becomes more familiar, an earlier one gradually erodes.

The artist would like to thank Te Rūnanga o Ōtākou, Kāti Huirapa Rūnaka ki Puketeraki, Te Rūnanga o Moeraki and Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu for their permission and support in working with Ōamaru limestone and filming in Central Otago.

kōwhai ~ native tree with clusters of yellow flowers

pūrākau ~ myths, ancient legends, stories

takata whenua ~ Indigenous people, literally ‘people of the land’

mana whenua ~ Māori with authority over particular land or territory

kaitiaki ~ guardians

takiwā ~ district, area

kōtuku ~ rare white heron

He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil (from August 2024)

These tranquil and reassuringly well-fed tigers offer an unexpected view of a creature many associate with danger. Chrystabel Aitken’s lifelong interest in animals meant she took up every opportunity to observe and sketch them – paying of a later visit to the Taronga Zoo in Sydney that she only wished she could have spent weeks there instead of days. As in much of her printmaking and sculpture, this linocut fuses a strong sense of naturalism with a stylised approach to pattern and colour – a combination perfectly suited to the sleek, striped coats of this affectionate pair.

(Dear Shurrie: Francis Shurrock and his contemporaries, 8 March – 13 July 2025)

This remarkable mid seventeenth-century marbled slipware bottle, or costrel, originates from a pottery production region in Tuscany and likely left Italy containing wine or oil. Also known as a pilgrim flask, it has holes through the moulded satyr masks to hold a rope cord. A near-identical vessel is found in Gerrit Dou’s The Physician (1653).

(Out of Time, 23 September 2023 – 28 April 2024)