Coastal Signs is pleased to present sisters, a solo exhibition of new photography by Shannon Te Ao. 


The images that comprise sisters are dual portraits of young women –two of the artist’s children– shot on medium format film in the natural environment. Each work is titled with a kīwaha (an idiom or casual phrase) from te ao Māori that use metaphors from the natural world to describe someone’s characteristics - for example, ‘he rākau taumata’ (the tree where birds gather) for a person with great wisdom that attracts others to them, or ‘he māhuri tōtara’ (the seedling of the tōtara) for a young person with big potential.

In recent photography Te Ao’s figures have been captured tumbling through space, here the figures are moving slowly (if at all) in inky blackness, often with their gaze fixed on the viewer. The figures are ethereal, almost ghostly, like apparitions appearing from or disappearing into liminal space. In sisters, however, dark is not presented as oppositional to light but rather the two are blended and indivisible.

The dissolving boundaries in Te Ao’s photographs are both physical and metaphorical, aesthetic and political. Together with distinctive blur –produced by slow shutter speeds and a printing method that produces the softest, almost-painterly blending of colours– the images in sisters trouble Western notions of self-determination and sovereignty. Te Ao offers a more dynamic concept of time and relatedness, culminating in a method (or ethics) of practice that undermines the autonomy of art (or any thing) as separate from context or whakapapa.

As Te Ao says: “it’s a simplification to conflate the concept of whakapapa with human genealogy alone. Central within te ao Māori and embedded within our place in Aotearoa, whakapapa allows us to connect through people, the environment, time, events, even the intangible. Our whakapapa reaches from within the lands that we inhabit to our celestial tupuna. Commonly we situate ourselves somewhere within this constellation, not as its origin or endpoint.”

Shannon Te Ao (b. 1978, Sydney, Ngāti Tūwharetoa / Ngāti Wairangi / Ngāti Te Rangiita / Te Pāpaka-a-Maui) lives and work in Te Whanaganui-a-Tara Wellington. Shannon holds a BFA from University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts and an MFA from the College of Creative Arts at Massey University Wellington. Te Ao's work has been exhibited in major solo and group exhibitions at prominent national and international venues including: the Hawai’i Triennial, REMAI Modern; Oakville Galleries, The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10), and the 13th Gwangju Biennale. In 2016 Shannon was awarded The Walters Prize.