The Shoes Off Your Voice

Sorawit collected me from my Mt Eden flat, where I waited on the front steps. I would be meeting their mother who was visiting from Thailand. We were taking her for dinner at a cheap but reliable Malaysian restaurant on K’ Road. 

She sat in the front, next to Sorawit who was driving. From the back I could see that she too was beautiful, elegant but understated. I ask a question. She does not answer but corrects me as if by singing their name: “Sor-ra-wit.” High- mid-falling. Long-short-short. “It’s Sorawit.” 

I want her to know her child has a good friend, family, here, in me. But I cannot even say their name. She goes on, teaching me gently as we drive—calling their name for me to call it back. High-mid-falling. Long-short-short.[1]

Their fellowship exhibition will be their most significant work to date. I know this not because of any work I might foresee but simply because of the fellowship’s resource. Along with an exhibition at The University of Otago’s Hocken Gallery, Frances Hodgkins Fellows receive a twelve-month tenancy to a studio on campus and a salary equivalent to that of a full- time lecturer. We talk by video call. Me in bed, Sorawit in their studio—where we always are. I ask Sorawit if there is an artist or artwork they particularly, currently, admire. They cannot, or choose not to answer my question. In the lead-up to exhibitions Sorawit quickly becomes nocturnal and I am lucky if we share a waking hour for talking. When we do, they tend to their materials—sanding stone, pressing flowers, smoothing wool, cleaning shells—only to occasionally look up at me through the screen. It has been some time since Sorawit has lived with me here in Tāmaki Makaurau. They left for Stockholm in 2018 on the invitation of Swedish curator and educator Maria Lind— who, on a whirlwind visit to Aotearoa the year before, suffered severe jet lag and needed to cancel her visit to Sorawit’s studio. Asleep, face-down on an ‘Urban Marae Mattress’, it was on the petition of then-Artspace Director Misal Adnan Yıldız that she met the last artist on the day’s itinerary.[2] Sorawit moved here in 2001 from their birthplace Chiang Mai, a mountainous city in Northern Thailand. They departed soon after opening their first major solo exhibition, Starling (2018), at Artspace Aotearoa. They completed the McCahon House Artists’ Residency that same summer, where the weeks were spent animating the tale of teina Kauri and Tohorā.[3]

As part of the Swedish Government’s funded programme for international artists, Sorawit was a working resident of Stockholm’s art world. Through these months they presented work in the Tensta Konsthalle’s exhibition Soon Enough: Art in Action, curated by Lind, and gained insight into local history and politics through working with Sámi practitioners, sharing with them discourses from Aotearoa. Sorawit then followed curator Berit Schuck to Alexandria, Egypt, to assist on an independent arts programme, before pausing in Thailand to spend time with aunties who taught them the material and gender traditions of Thai kite-making and flying.

With copper wire, brightly dyed merino wool and pressed flowers, Sorawit translated the gendered kite shapes of Pakpao (female) and Chula (male) to sculptural elements in the body of work Jupiter (2019). First shown at Te Uru, instead of instruments of games or sport, Sorawit’s ‘third’ kites were conceptualised as intermediaries or lines between sky and earth—or any dualism that structures our world. Upon Jupiter’s inclusion in the 2021 exhibition The Turn of the Fifth Age by Selasar Sunaryo Art Space and Taipei Contemporary Art Center, Sorawit presented a research conversation with Indonesian kite expert, Zaini Alif. The two shared ideas about flying’s relationship to desire, progression, and ideas of civilisation (as well as the kite practices of their own regions).

Eventually settling in Pōneke after completing the Enjoy Rita Angus Cottage Summer Residency, Sorawit produced The Interior (2019) for the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki North Terrace. Comprised of a chorus of digitally modelled, life-sized birds cast and carved in resin, fibreglass and Ōamaru limestone, it was a sculptural assemblage that brought into the round Trevor Lloyd’s Te tangi o te moa (1907), which depicts forest life mourning the body of its last moa.

Cast in translucent cyan fibreglass, Sorawit’s moa—as if in the process of fading—glowed as it lay in the natural light of the outdoor courtyard. This sculptural ‘cartooning’ of threatened and extinct bird species worked to mediate the gaze from the zoological, categorical other toward our own human feelings of finitude. Like a reanimation of historical extinction, the installation recalled the timescale of death at the species level, prompting us to consider nature, climate and extinction.[4] Elements of the installation were included in the 2022 exhibition Nature and State at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden in Southern Germany, which Yıldız now directs.

In 2020 Sorawit received funding to study kōtuku, native white herons, at their nesting ground on the banks of the Waitangiroto River near the village of Ōkārito on the South Island’s West Coast. The white heron is a cosmopolitan bird, found worldwide in tropical and temperate regions. It is still unknown why or how the New Zealand subspecies, which habituates so far from its climatic and geographic range, first came to thrive on our cold West Coast. Returning to the birds in their unlikely home over two years, Sorawit spent days alone acclimatising to the birds’ environment and behaviours—practising a kind of field ornithology that, I imagine, equally observed self at play in the boundaries of place, subjectivity and nature.