B.

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.

The title of this work means ‘to bring to light, to claim again’. The seven heitiki (greenstone pendants) Fiona Pardington has photographed came originally from her iwi, Kāi Tahu, in Te Waipounamu. All are now held in the collection of Auckland Museum. Traditionally worn close to the heart, heitiki are sacred fertility symbols in te ao Māori, strongly associated with whakapapa (family connections across time). Fiona not only wanted to record the physical attributes of these old and precious objects, but also to capture their more intangible qualities, such as how they speak of the past and this place, despite being stored so far away.

(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )