Te Tauranga / The Landing / Le Taulaga: Emily Parr

We welcome Emily Parr as the third Artist in Residence of our site’s rotating gallery. Her work is a vignette that connects to Fehokotaki, an exhibition on now at St Paul Street Gallery.

Through the time spiral: Te Muri III revisits camping trips Emily’s family made to a small bay on the Mahurangi Peninsula during the early 1900s. During the summer holidays, her great-great-grandparents (Louisa and Gustav Kronfeld) and their many children travelled north from Tāmaki Makaurau. They were joined by ʻāiga visiting from Sāmoa, girls in their care from the Islands, and other families who share similar stories of cultural multiplicity and mobility (including the Silva, Greig and Geddes families). These camping trips manifest their expansive web of relations across the Moana, which they continued to nurture after migrating to Aotearoa. This vignette is part of an ongoing series: by revisiting sites of familial connection and archival material, the artist seeks to meet her ancestors in the time spiral.

Emily Parr (Ngāi Te Rangi, Moana, Pākehā) is an artist living in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa (Auckland, New Zealand). Her moving-image practice weaves through time and space, exploring systems of relation emerging from Te Moananui-a-Kiwa. Emily’s recent Master’s research on settler-indigenous relationships traverses oceans and centuries, seeking stories in archives and waters on haerenga to her ancestral homelands of Tauranga Moana, Sāmoa and Tonga. Her current doctoral research considers the responsibilities she has inherited through her ancestral legacies and, in particular, to her family’s collection of taonga and measina held by a museum.

Through the time spiral: Te Muri III will be on Te Tauranga / The Landing / Le Taulaga until Matariki.

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