This City Gallery Wellington exhibition is located offsite at National Library of New Zealand.

Grounded in the work of Moorina Bonini (Yorta Yorta/Wurundjeri/Wiradjuri), Lily Dowd, Te Ara Minhinnick (Ngaati Te Ata) and Dr Areta Wilkinson (Kai Tahu), Meditations presents creative practice as a dynamic archive, an active space of knowledge transmission and collective imaginations. The exhibition locates personal archives within memory and material—oneone (sand), whenua, stone, language and light.

Whenua is a site of evidence, holding layered histories we should not forget. Te Ara Minhinnick uses whenua as a material to enact a process she has referred to as re-representation. By bringing whenua into the gallery she invokes a whakapapa that begins in the land and extends out to herself and her whānau in an assertion of Tino Rangatiratanga.

The matauraka of Te Waipounamu are compressed into precious metals. Taking this knowledge and material as a starting point, Dr Areta Wilkinson’s jewellery practice employs methods of making that explore pepeha. Riverbanks and stones become sites where the past, present and future coalesce.

Resistance to the digital archive is brought to the fore in Lily Dowd’s work. Engaged in cameraless modes of photographic making, Dowd cultivates intimate conversations between maker and artwork. Through her ongoing investigations into lumen printing she folds touch, contact and personal encounter into her practice.

Moorina Bonini employs Indigenous language and gestural marks to disrupt the primacy of Western institutions. Using charcoal sourced from Country, Bonini’s mark-making forms a counterpart to the neutrality of the gallery’s traditional white walls. This work brings indigenous knowledge to the fore, reasserting their enduring position on Country.

The artists in Meditations cultivate agency, autonomy and activism to build dynamic and evolving material archives.

Read our interview with curator Israel Randell here.