Skip to main content

Beyond the ash cloud (2019)

Beyond the ash cloud (bitten by the sea) (2019)

Beyond the ash cloud (be huge) (2019)

Ana Iti

Location: Level 1, Waitohi Johnsonville Hub

These two typeset, hand printed text works are from an installation produced for the Govett-Brewster Gallery in New Plymouth. The exhibition, beyond the ash cloud, is a poetic enquiry into the local whenua/land through memory and politics. Iti’s personal interpretations of traditional stories and contested narratives are also central. Iti’s work combines found texts with her own words to explore a chronology of history: the layering of geologic processes, Māori ancestral beings, industrial structures and landscapes of city streets. These texts are then combined with clay collected from her ancestral home in Northland, with earth collected from pyroclastic and laharic flow outcrops around coastal Oākura (near Mt. Taranaki), along with a field recording of atmospheric sounds recorded while collecting this earth. Iti brings together different ways of creating historical narratives: text, sound and objects.

A poem made with old fashioned typeset letters. Ink is a dark grey and is embossed onto a thick ivory paper. Some words have been redacted by using the flat end of the intended letter block. The left margin slopes creating a slight parallelogram shaped block of text. The poem reads: Bitten by the sea with nauseous boredom I trip over igneous rocks decant iron sand into my sneakers twist my ankle to get to the water squint to the horizon (see those aliens) sucking and pumping beneath the sea floor cables linking us to the cloud run undersea too buried deeper still slumbering volcanoes lava pillows once spewed from their mouths not anymore

Beyond the ash cloud (bitten by the sea) (2019)

A poem made with old fashioned typeset letters. Ink is a dark grey and is embossed onto a thick ivory paper. Some words have been redacted by using the flat end of the intended letter block. The poem reads: [redacted text] be huge Long-extinct [redacted text] Buried deep below the [redacted text] floor The most explosive [redacted text] have the consistency, viscosity And approximate density of wet concrete: Fluid when moving, solid at rest.

Beyond the ash cloud (be huge) (2019)

About the artist

Wellington based artist Ana Iti (Te Rarawa) explores the practice of history making. A multidisciplinary artist, she works across sculpture, video and film. By surveying personal narratives and subjective experiences in relation to land and geology, Iti explores connections to place through language and memory. Through this investigation she seeks to unveil the process of imbuing land with cultural and personal meaning.

Iti graduated from Ilam School of Fine Arts in Christchurch with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2012 and from Massey University Wellington with a Masters in Fine Arts in 2019. She has exhibited throughout New Zealand, undertaken an artist residency in Adelaide, Australia and was the 2020 artist in residence at McCahon House, Auckland.