Māturuturu Trick Heidi Brickell

Exploring the connection of starlight to the whakapapa (genealogy) of emotions like grief and isolation, Heidi Brickell (Te Hika o Pāpāuma, Ngāi Tara, Ngāti Kahungunu, Rongomaiwahine, Rangitāne, Ngāti Apakura, Airihi, Kōtirana, Ingarangi, Tiamana) presents an immersive new installation.

 In Māturuturu Trick, the artist draws tender attention to Uru-te-Ngangana: an atua (deity) of Māori cosmology associated with light, the firstborn offspring of Ranginui (Sky Father) and Papatūānuku (Earth Mother). After fighting with his siblings in the dark, Uru experiences profound sadness and chooses to self-isolate. Weeping in solitude, Uru is eventually discovered by his younger brother Tāne Mahuta, who requests his help. Uru gifts Tāne two baskets of his tears, who decorates the sky with these – becoming the stars, moon, and sun we see today. Birthed from isolation, these tears now bring us the comfort of light to lessen our loneliness. From this pūrākau (traditional story) we can glean that complex feelings like solitude or grief have an important place within our selves and origins.

In this space, new constellations emerge. Abstracted and prismatic roimata (teardrop) forms hang in suspension from the rafters, as if caught between realms. Various media and processes from Brickell’s art practice evolve forms, such as spontaneous line drawing, threading, binding, painting, and wire manipulation. Using shapeshifting as a mātāpono tuku iho (principle handed down by ancestors), Brickell refers to a continuum of knowledge that is rediscovered through play and experimentation. Positive and negative spaces are woven into each other by design, as one only exists via the other. Faces, hands and eyes peer down from wooden structural forms, and a motif of waha (mouth) is repeated, stretched open.

The whakapapa of isolation in a Māori worldview is explored by Brickell in tandem with economic and technological conditions that fracture our social relations and inner worlds. As systems of extraction tend to dispossess working class and Indigenous peoples of shared time, land and resources, loneliness and struggle are not new experiences for many. Māturuturu, meaning to trickle in te reo Māori, is associated with crying, and here also refers to the false promise of trickle-down economics that can influence or force us to be separated from our interconnectedness.

Such feelings and stories made material, help to ground our engagement with the present. The impact of late capitalism is not only felt upon the desecration of earth and sky, but also in the space of our heart and mind. There is grief yet to be processed at what has been lost, and power in what can emerge from the darkness.