Kia ora Ana. Congratulations on this huge achievement and for your beautiful installation at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. 

One of the most striking things about A resilient heart like the mānawa is the way it towers over us. You position the visitor on the shoreline at low tide, where we might look up through the slats of the wharf or inspect what the receding waters have left behind. How did the Rawene Wharf come into focus for you and how did this particular interpretation of the structure take shape? 

Thank you so much! 

I was first interested in the wharf as a conceptual starting point; at its most simple, a structure to arrive at and leave from. When I started working on the project I had not yet been to Rawene or Motukaraka and I knew that making this work would mean going on a journey in many different ways for me. I hoped that this form could have a personal meaning and story, but also expand to be able to connect with other people and other stories. I feel like this is an idea that lots of people can relate to, thinking about a place, the complexities of leaving somewhere and hoping to return.

That was where my thoughts about what shape the work might take started. I was then able to spend two months in Rawene at the start of the year on a residency, dreaming and planning the forms and installation of the work. What is in the Auckland Art Gallery is not what you would experience down at the wharf in Rawene; it is a new thing that took that existing form and place as a starting point and abstracted it. I wanted to make the steel frames as something open, a three-dimensional drawing in space, transforming the cast concrete piles into a form that is hollow and that you can see through. I think about the way the work sits in the gallery as an exploded form, it’s ambiguous and unfinished. Is it a structure that is going up or coming down?

The audio component of the work is drawn from field recordings made while you were developing the work in Rawene. Can you tell us more about this process and how it sits with your sculptural thinking? 

During the residency I was also making the audio work. I wanted to explore the possibilities of sound in relation to sculpture, and it seemed like a good way to think about time as an element in the work. While I was in Rawene I was making field recordings; I wasn’t sure what I was listening for but I was hoping that some kind of voice would become clear. I was working with an audio engineer, Simon Lear, who told me it would be good to listen back and make detailed notes on my recordings as frequently as possible, as it is easy to record many hours worth of sound and not be sure where particular interesting moments are. So I would listen back to my recordings every couple of days, it was a very active way of remembering what had happened and what I had been doing.

When I started thinking about the installation, I was always thinking about the sound at the same time. There are two different audio ‘voices’ that are part of the installation, they’re each positioned at the entry and exit points of the space. I think of them like two pools which bathe the work in sound, they overlap a little in the middle. One voice has almost as much silence as sound; it’s me waiting for the car ferry to arrive at the wharf. You hear, at first, the ferry engine droning in the background; it arrives, unloads cars and passengers, and then leaves again. The other voice is more textural and flickering, brief snippets of sound; the kauri boards of the church I was staying in creaking; my footsteps down the wooden boardwalk through the mānawa; wind whistling through bamboo; cicadas loudly screeching in the heat.

The work is in conversation with the structure of the Rawene Wharf, originally built to serve the town’s timber industry which extracted kauri from the surrounding area—perhaps an example of what Ngahuia Harrison calls ‘cannibal capitalism’. The old wharf at Rawene has now been replaced by a concrete structure, but across the harbour in Kohukohu you can still see the remains of another wharf from the same period, reduced to just its pylons sunk into the muddy shoreline, much like the mānawa, mangrove forest, that you foreground in the title. Can you speak to the presence of these two rākau—kauri and mānawa—in the work? 

While researching for this work I read a report by Patu Hohepa where he described what he believed the Hokianga would have looked and sounded like prior to human arrival. He talked about the kauri forests and birdsong. I was thinking about relationships to place and how they change over time, how the kauri forests would have once lined the Hokianga and they were then extracted as one of the first industrial trades of the region. The harvesting of kauri attracted people to the Hokianga. Once the kauri was consumed the trade ceased to exist, of course.

As you mentioned, the work is named after the mānawa or native mangrove which grows on the shoreline of the Hokianga, this summer season they had produced a lot of seeds, which are really miniature versions of the tree called propagules. The propagule floats in the water and can live for many months. Eventually it settles into the mud, but can be uprooted many times until it finds an appropriate place to grow. 

These two rākau both connect to an idea of friction, where two bodies meet, rub up against each other and are shaped by this relationship. I think of this as ‘ko te pā o te hōanga’, or the touch of the grindstone. The kauri and its relationship with the place and the changing people of the Hokianga, its finite ability to attract and sustain people and the capitalist urge to consume it in totality. The mānawa exists in this tidal zone where it is able to reproduce and thrive, this site has ongoing changes, where the water is rising and the shore line needs to be protected. This touch of the grindstone has created fragile ecosystems and fragile landscapes.

When announcing you as the winner of the Walters Prize 2024, Professor Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung said of your installation that it “shares something in common with great poetry.” How do you find the poetry within these infrastructural forms that bring forth the weight of colonisation?

What a compliment from Bonaventure. The way I navigate the weight is by thinking about the form and its meaning—how can I relate to it, learn from it, or understand it in some way? I try to use some of this approach to think about both the forms and processes outside of what they have been built and used for, outside of that is there something else, something useful or even positive.

In the lecture he delivered the night before the prize was awarded, Soh Bejeng Ndikung proposed that the function of art is not not to give solutions to the conflicts of our times, but to offer questions that allow us to describe and grapple with those conflicts. What question does A resilient heart like the mānawa pose? 

I think I have already answered some of this in my previous response, however I hope for my work that it will be able to accumulate new questions and new thoughts as it continues to exist. I don’t always see every angle to my work, I know what it means to me, but once it goes out into the world it has a life of its own.