Beyond your tadpole stage // your spinal cord dissolves

Archived Event
Beyond your tadpole stage // your spinal cord dissolves

Past Event

Louie Zalk-Neale
Performance
Adam Art Gallery Te Pataka Toi
Beyond your tadpole s...
Wed 1
Opening Night
Louie Zalk-Neale
“When you’re amongst the biodiversity of forests & beaches, you’re part of an ecological system based in fluidity and adaptability ~ that’s whakapapa. “
Louie Zalk-Neale

Hosted by PAWA

Beyond your tadpole s...

About Event

2023
Performance

Beyond your tadpole stage // your spinal cord dissolves

“Human bodies are like household appliances — we have two sides of imperfect symmetry — which is easily taken for granted when we navigate the world around us. Many moana-dwellers have radial symmetry, like starfish, sand dollars, car tyres, jellyfish, bottlecaps and kāeo (sea tulips). After hatching from an egg, a kāeo begins their life as a tadpole, and eventually they attach their mouth-end to a rock where their body morphs into a stalked, fleshy alien tulip. Human tadpoles can’t do that unfortunately.” – Louie Zalk-Neale 

 

Louie Zalk-Neale performs to activate a sculptural taonga, a blue plastic barrel that enables several people to direct their focus along radiating tendrils to the central moana-filled vessel. Intricately woven kawe (strapping) made from tī kōuka (cabbage tree leaves) holds seven kōhatu (rocks) bound to the end of each taura (rope), including pounamu (jade and serpentine), ōnewa (graywacke), kōkawa (andesite), tokauku (shale), and takawai (quartz) sourced from Kā Tiritiri o te Moana (the Southern Alps) and from Taranaki. Tī kōuka fibre is customarily used for fishing lines and waka bindings because it lasts a long time before breaking down in sea water. Louie has used it to bind carved pungapunga (pumice stones) which float inside the plastic barrel, their form mimicking the kāeo sea tulip. 

 

The barrel and its technical jewellery were made by Adam Ben-Dror (Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Tangata Tiriti), who is an artist who looks to the masses of human-generated scraps of overconsumption with opportunistic eyes and reconfigures e-waste and plastic into new forms, imagining new ways of co-existing with the more than human world in troubled times. Part of the sculpture, a carved pounamu mauri stone named Tuāhine Pouhanga (sisters of creation) was contributed by Neke Moa (Ngāti Kahungunu ki Ahuriri, Kāi Tahu, Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Tūwharetoa), an adornment and object artist who reveals whakapapa and connection by bringing together pattern and forms from the atua and their stories. Ngā mihi ki a Dr Tāwhanga Nopera, Paula Conroy, Yuval Zalk-Neale, Ann Shelton, Aroha Jensen, Whiro Walker, and Gus Fisher Gallery for tautoko in creating this work.

 

Part of PAWA 2023 Opening Night

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Part of PAWA 2023 Exhibited Works

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