Korihi te manu (for Reuben)

Title of artwork: Korihi te manu (for Reuben)

Artist: Megan Brady (Ngāi Tūāhuriri/Kāi Tahu, Pākehā). Painted by Nathan Carroll.

Date: 2024

Category of work: Mural

Media: Paint on sealed brick wall

Where you can see it: Cloisters toilets entrance, ground floor, Electrical Engineering Building, Follow the public toilet signs from North Quad left of Stay, the sculpture by Anthony Gormley, or from the south side near the glass overbridge.

Thanks to: Natural Paint Co.

This work was developed specifically for the site when Megan Brady was a creative-in-residence at Te Matatiki Toi Ora The Arts Centre in 2023.

At the time, she was engaging with ideas of return, memory, placemaking, and time as part of tracing her Kai Tahu whakapapa and reconnecting with her ancestral sites. She says: “I whakapapa to Ngāi Tūāhuriri through my dad. He was born in Kaiapoi and grew up close to Tuahiwi marae, where he spent much of his youth. However due to generations of disconnection, he grew up on whenua he didn’t know we came from.”

Coming to the residency from Ōtepoti Dunedin, Brady wanted to research her ancestral awa, Rakahuri / Ashley River. This artwork evokes a braided river while it contemplates layers of human connection to place.

The artist writes:

Tracing my whakapapa, seeking connections, visualising what my lineage looks like in a form that makes sense to me.

The mural site and wider Art Centre location holds layers of overlapping histories for me as Ngāi Tūāhuriri/Kāi Tahu. As well as more recent family experiences such as my father studying onsite when it was the university and personally undertaking the residency programme.

I think of the moments/places/points in time of intersection or overlap between us and our tūpuna. The memories held in the landscape, the way we collide with their energy, and learn through bodily experience/embodied knowledge in places of significance.

I think about the various pathways made in and around the space now, in the past and in the future.

I think of the local māhika kai sites of Pūtarikamotu, Puāri and Ōtautahi and the channels and pathways which connected them.

I think of my dad taking shortcuts through the north quad to get to his classes in time. The mural site is a thoroughfare, that shelters coming and going, a transitory space.

I think about ephemeral pathways, of sunlight or memory. A contemplation on the way things change, an invitation to consider those pathways layering around us.

The braided river speaks to these pathways, the locality of the site, and its directional orientation towards the moana.

Metaphorically, the braided river speaks to the hybridity of Te Matatiki Toi Ora being a place made up of many histories and current happenings/functions, weaving these different things together.

Materially it allows for the braiding of specific paint colours to play with the concept of a mural that aligns with my practice.