Rapanui, which in te reo Māori means ‘the great sternpost’, stood for thousands of years near Matuku-takotako Sumner, where the Ōpāwaho Heathcote and the Ōtākaro Avon rivers drain out to sea. Māori used the rock as a marker for passage into the estuary, an important mahika kai (food and resource gathering area) where Ngāi Tahu gathered shellfish, eels and harakeke. A naturally occurring seastack, known to many locals as Shag Rock, Rapanui was eight metres tall before the destructive earthquake of February 2011 reduced it to a heap half that high. Mark Adams’ photograph, taken twenty-three years earlier and reprinted following the earthquake, highlights that shocking transformation. It also calls attention to the many overlaid histories – human and natural – of this place.

(Absence, May 2023)

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.