This pairing of Ana Iti’s A dusty handrail on the track (2021) with Fiona Pardington’s Mauria Mai, Tono Ano (Bringing to Light/Claiming Again) (2001) from Ngā Puhipuhi o Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington Art Collection responds to Living / Building the joint Romantic Studies Association of Australasia/David Nichol Seminar conference, 26–28 November 2025. The conference is a chance to think about connections between the literary, artistic, political, and scientific culture of the ‘long’ Romantic period (c. 1750–1850) and today. Living / Building draws inspiration from the building of Te Herenga Waka’s Living Pā, the Māori meeting house, research and teaching facility on campus now known as Ngā Mokopuna. Ngā Mokopuna aspires to Living Building™ certification, meaning that it is built to high sustainability and environmental standards according to a building philosophy which seeks to actively do good rather than just reducing harm. Embedded throughout the project are Māori principles of design, learning, and community.

Pardington and Iti’s works, like Living / Building, seek to reclaim and activate connections between the past and today. Pardington’s photographs Mauria Mai, Tono Ano (Bringing to Light/Claiming Again) present seven Kāi Tahu hei tiki held in the collections of the Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira. These hei tiki are made by her ancestors, they are of her whenua. Pardington’s slow deliberate images describe something more than a straightforward photographic representation of the hei tiki. Her process captures their mauri or life force and in doing so allows these taonga to live again, to be seen and cared for despite remaining tucked away in the museum context.

Iti’s digital video A dusty handrail on the track draws on the work of three wāhine Māori authors, Keri Hulme’s Te Kaihau: The Windeater (1986); June Mitchell’s Amokura (1978); and J. C. Sturm’s House of the Talking Cat (1983). Within these texts the artist searches for the words of a poem she has written, exploring how her words might sound in their voices. These authors become guides as Iti weaves through their work highlighting words and phrases. She references the loaded history of censorship by blanking out large sections of text. However, here Iti is using this technique to create rather than suppress meaning. This continues a theme in Iti’s work, where she delves into the past, excavating histories, narratives, sites, documents and the technical devices developed for their dissemination, filtering the embedded remnants of a collective inheritance through the lens of her Māori identity.

Pardington’s work implores us to think about how to care for not just the physical but also the spiritual needs of the hei tiki made by her iwi, while Iti’s work searches for a way of conversing through the stories of mana wāhine chosen as part of a personal constellation of influence. The title of this exhibition quotes biologist Mere Roberts’ influential writing on the notion of whakapapa as a conceptual basis for a Māori way of understanding the world. Roberts writes of whakapapa as a complex form of genealogy able to hold multiple ontologies. It is at once grounded in natural science and spiritual knowledge. She invites us to apply this framework expansively and suggests that ‘there is a genealogy for every word, thought, object, mineral, place and person’. We might add artworks to this list and begin to trace the multifaceted relationships they embody.

This exhibition has been curated by Kaiwhakarākei, Curator Collections, Sophie Thorn.