Curatorial Statement | Artist's Résumé

'I like to have impossible tasks and to have very little control. Like with clay, I will make things difficult simply because it increases the range of possibilities. I don't like to make things easy for myself. I have to have an element of physical risk. To start with, it forces me to rethink all the time just what it is I want to achieve. So I have a brilliant idea, say, but because of the materials, materials that change over the time I'm working, I'm forced to compromise.'

Shona Rapira Davies originally made Raising the Taniwha, a series of small, wall-mounted ceramic figures, while on a residency for indigenous artists at the Banff Centre of the Arts in Canada. On her trip back, the fragile works were broken into tiny pieces when opened at the New Zealand border by the Customs Department. Arriving back at her home on Great Barrier Island, Davies was forced to completely remake the works from scratch.

Each figure in Raising the Taniwha paddles through an invisible sea on waka made from driftwood found by Davies and her family on the beaches around Great Barrier Island. The figures, their features roughly hewn in terracotta, each represent a different member of the artist's family. While localised in this personal way, Raising the Taniwha also speaks passionately about a larger issue currently dominating the New Zealand political landscape: the debate over ownership of the seabed and foreshore.

Emma Bugden