A SEPARATION BETWEEN YOU AND ME, 2022

Exhibited in The long waves of our ocean: New responses to Pacific poems, Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa National Library of New Zealand, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, curated by Hanahiva Rose

In A separation between you and me, Ana Iti has sprayed the interior of a reclaimed window with salty water. On the glass, the dried salt forms a delicate hardened skin. Using her finger, Iti has traced thes words onto its surface:

I think about
you

ancient
mara kumara
dusty silty lake
salt crust
thick enough
to walk on

Just outside of Blenheim is Kāpara Te Hau. Iti evokes the layered histories of this landscape in her text: the kumara gardens of Rangitāne tupuna Te Hau; a shallow lake, protected from the open sea by a shingle beach and sand dunes; and, since 1943, a saltwork – the largest producer of salt in Aotearoa.

Iti has responded to J. C. Sturm’s anticipation of waves that ‘will wash the rocks / Outside our windows, / Spraying the glass with salt’, as an instruction to consider our relationship with the places we live in and the broader landscapes they occupy. Windows mar the fragile separation between domestic life and the world which takes place around it, the mediated and the unrestrained, stillness and movement. On Iti’s window the text is written on the interior – a message from the inside out.

- Hanahiva Rose