Wellington based artist Ana Iti (Te Rarawa) explores the practice of history making through language and memory. A multidisciplinary artist, she works across sculpture, video and film. Iti explores connections to place by surveying personal narratives and subjective experiences in relation to land and geology. Through this investigation she seeks to unveil the process of imbuing land with cultural and personal meaning.

These two typed text works are from an installation produced for the Govett-Brewster Gallery in New Plymouth. The exhibition, beyond the ash cloud, is a poetic enquiry into the local whenua/land through memory and politics. Personal interpretations of traditional stories and contested narratives are also central. Iti’s work combines found texts with her own words to explore a chronology of history: the layering of geologic processes, Māori ancestral beings, industrial structures and landscapes of city streets. In the original installation, these texts are then combined with clay collected from her ancestral home in Northland, with earth collected from pyroclastic and laharic flow outcrops around coastal Oākura (near Mt. Taranaki), along with a field recording of atmospheric sounds recorded while collecting this earth. Iti brings together different ways of creating historical narratives: text, sound and objects.

Ana Iti graduated from Canterbury University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2012 and from Massey University Wellington with a Master of Fine Arts degree in 2019. She has exhibited throughout New Zealand, undertaken an artist residency in Adelaide, Australia and was the 2020 artist in residence at McCahon House, Auckland.