Growing up in Ōmārama in the centre of Te Waipounamu South Island, Ross Hemera was taken to the region’s ana whakairo, or Māori rock art sites, by his father, Boko. As a child, he visited many sites around Waitaki and made studies of the ancient drawings on the walls and ceilings of the shelters. Hemera has formed a deep connection with the ana whakairo which inspires his creative practice. His work aims to conceptually express the cultural values and beliefs of Kāi Tahu through new interpretations of the motifs used by his tūpuna.Ka moe te whaea i te wai is informed by the Kāi Tahu pūrākau about Takaroa and Papatūānuku. Takaroa was the first partner of Papatūānuku before she created a second union with Rakinui. Their partnership is a reminder of the inextricable relationship between land and water, and that whenua emerged from under the moana.

tūpuna ~ ancestors

Kāi Tahu ~ tribal group of much of Te Waipounamu South Island

pūrākau ~ myths, ancient legends, stories

Takaroa ~ the ocean

Papatūānuku ~ earth, earth mother

Rakinui ~ the sky

whenua ~ land

moana ~ sea, ocean

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

In the early 1990s, Julia Morison used gold and shit in many works, exploring the idealised and base elements of human experience. She drew on the Jewish Sefiroth as a model for thinking about the relationship between the physical and the metaphysical. “Personally, I need to put some kind of order on experience for sake of sanity and negotiation,” she said. “The Sefirothic structure, or Tree of Knowledge, is really a metaphorical file and folder system for all; a conceptual paradigm for understanding everything. Putting that at the core of my practice gives me the freedom to admit everything and anything, micro and macro, metaphysical and corporeal, as legitimate content. It also gives me an interface to compose works.”

The title of this work, Dulia, is a Catholic term for worship given to saints and angels. Here Morison has pressed gold and excrement on to handmade paper balls, which are threaded together like the beads of a catholic rosary—an invitation to meditate on the relationship of the sacred and the profane, on a monumental scale.