Made for an exhibition in Rarotonga, Ani O’Neill’s tiny light-hearted sculptures are inspired by a children’s nursery rhyme, This little piggy went to market. But the association is not entirely benign. In the Cook Islands, puaka, or pigs, are a common source of food, but have also contributed to significant environmental problems. In the nursery rhyme one of the little pigs eats roast beef, but instead O’Neill has stuffed her roundest pig with a can of corned beef, a staple food of the Pacific—an imported product which has undermined traditional local fishing and cultivation skills.

O’Neill is an important figure in the generation of New Zealand Pasifika artists who came to prominence in the 1990s. Using Cook Island art techniques taught to her by her aunties and grandmother, including crochet, sewing and tivaevae (appliqué quilt-making), she makes work that looks at island culture from an urban perspective. Both cultures and both lived experiences are present in her sculptures and installations at once. O’Neill’s work often incorporates a social dimension, including holding markets or providing her viewers with opportunities to learn new textile skills. “I feel quite privileged to have these skills”, says O’Neill. “I know a lot of people don’t get the opportunity to learn these kind of things from their grandparents any more. I thought it was a responsibility to pass it on.”

(Your Hotel Brain 13 May 2017 - 8 July 2018)

“Though people may not see my work as political – it is. I want to re-ignite something inside the viewer that they may have forgotten existed; the ‘Pacific Island way’ of creating the world.” —Ani O’Neill In Cook Islands Māori, 'etu iti means ‘little stars’. This work was inspired by sacred objects from Oceania that are usually never seen or touched: bundles of fine sticks bound with feathers collected from Hawai'i long ago and now held in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, England. It was created for an exhibition in which artists responded to the museum’s collections. Interested in “passing on the flame to light new paths”, Ani O’Neill worked with the help of local school children. She often works collaboratively, empowering people through art making. Through this process she upholds Polynesian values, using her work to foster a sense of community rather than elitism. She also chooses everyday materials, and by elevating their status she challenges the western hierarchy of materials and art forms.

(Te Wheke, 2020)

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.