Lyrical essays, theoretical essays, fictocritical essays, ekphrases. Mostly about Māori, BIPOC, queer or environmental art. Often pondering cultural perception and the gaze, plurality and multiplicity, home and exile, and the importance of being allowed to transition. It's a culture jam.
Listen your way home
2019
On Rachael Shearer’s majestic sound artwork ‘Te Oro o Te Ao’. Ate Journal of Contemporary Māori Art 1. June 2019.
Te tuna-whiri: the knot of eels
2017
This essay uses the Māori phenomena of hau and mauri as a lens to think through the efficacy of transcustomary Māori artworks by Terri Te Tau and Bridget Reweti within a global art context, concluding that these powerful works perform on multiple levels at once, addressing multiple audiences (differently) in the process.
Pitter patter, Papatūānuku
Fictocritical piece responding to Taranaki based video works by artist Alex Monteith. First published in Brief journal (NZ 2016), republished in Black Marks on the White Page.
Being still of a roving disposition, or, De-seeing: a polemic
2016
On John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea and Bridget Reweti’s Tirohanga. Invited talk, CoCA Centre of Contemporary Art, Ōtautahi Christchurch, 25 June 2016. Under revision.
Ulu utu
Fictocritical exhibition text responding to a work in Bridget Reweti’s exhibition ‘Tauutuutu’ (Pātaka 2016), featuring indigenous exchanges undertaken by the artist during her residency at Banff.
What you see you don’t see: Lisa Reihana’s Digital Marae
2011
A close conceptual reading of the ways Reihana uses multiple audiovisual media to recreate an immanent, affective marae experience for the far-from-home Māori viewer. World Art 1. February 2012.
Cheonggyecheon
Fictocritical piece responding to a series of photographs by Fiona Amundsen of the eponymous tributary of the Han river, Korea. Published in Landfall 216.
Portal in a storm
Fictocritical exhibition text written for the group exhibition ‘Portal in a storm’ (Rm 103, 2007), curated by Rebecca Ann Hobbs.