Upcoming Exhibition

Megan Brady combines materials and references in her artworks that each trace interlacing paths of information between imagined futures, where she is here/now and where she has been in the past.

Rimu means the endemic coniferous tree (one of several names for it), but also a plethora of kelps and seaweeds. It stems from limu - a proto Malayo-Polynesian term for seaweed, and in some places mosses and lichens. According to pūrākau shared with Brady, the name was given when rimu trees were first encountered by Māori because of how its narrow and feathery foliage appears similar to some types of seaweed and moss. All trees, like rimu, are made up of water and light. Their roots, trunks and branches carry dendritic chains of signals back and forth between the soil of the earth and the sky. Rimu wood is a material Brady has used recurrently in her artwork while she’s lived in Te Waipounamu, collecting it over time from sites and people that she has formed a personal bond with.

Takaroa is the great atua of the sea, lakes and rivers, and all of the plants and animals living there. Rimu through limu has a relationship to the sea. This characteristic of rimu wood has drawn Brady to it as a material, as she feels her own affinity to the sea. A feeling confirmed by the knowledge that one of her tupuna is also named Takaroa. Brady has shaped the names of female relatives, including Takaroa, into curving wire shapes refrencing takitahi, a weaving pattern of one over, one under. Evoking manawa, heartlines and timelines with its continuous course along the letters of each name and through the rimu beaded ellipses - it implies the before, between and beyond contained within these names, time and whakapapa.

Time can be measured out by the ebbing and flowing of the tides, or marked by the growth rings of a piece of wood. The word tide itself was used for a long time to mean a portion or space of time, or a point in the duration of a day, month and year or in a human life. Tides shift with the movements of the sun and moon, and in the gallery the transit of the sun is captured by Brady’s drawn thread linen textile works. The rising and falling sunlight filters through the patterning of each piece, similar to how light filters through the canopies of trees, tracking across the surfaces below. The colours of linen used throughout the exhibition reference shades of moss, ocean and bone, and are a mihi to iwi and whenua; bones being one of the meanings of iwi.

… we all become all of these things takes its title from a passage of Patricia Grace’s novel Potiki. Grace writes, “I had other stories too, known stories from before life and death and remembering … It was a new discovery to find that these stories were, after all, about our own lives, were not distant, that there was no past or future, that all time is a now-time, centred in the being … The enormous difficulty is to achieve refinement in reciprocity, because the wheel, the spiral, is balanced so exquisitely.”¹ This now-time, as Grace describes it, is a place where information ripples inwards and outwards. Collecting for a moment at a point before shifting with continual, ever-growing turns.