Mark Maurangi Carrol
Islands not to scale (maru a’ia’i) – Act III
Sydney Contemporary
Booth F06
10 – 14 September 2025
Islands not to scale (maru a’ia’i) – Act III
Sydney Contemporary
Booth F06
10 – 14 September 2025
Works
Installation views
Press release
Islands not to scale (Maru a’ia’i) is the concluding act in Mark Maurangi Carrol’s three- part exploration of scale, representation, and diasporic memory from a Pacific perspective. Across the trilogy—Ueata, Maru a’o, and now Maru a’ia’i—Carrol develops a hauntological practice: one where past and present images overlap, where memories refuse to settle, and where history continually returns to haunt the present. His works map the entanglements of identity, place, and belonging not as fixed narratives, but as spectral, unstable, and relational.
This final chapter turns to the shadows of evening. The subtitle, Maru a’ia’i—“the shadows of the evening” in Te Reo Ipukarea—frames a poetic call-and-response across the series, tracing the transition from day into night and reflecting on cycles of memory, return, and transformation.
Carrol paints groupings of figures—family portraits, community gatherings, musicians playing in pokata bands. Cropped and clustered, these forms echo a recurring motif: figures turned in profile or away, inhabiting ambiguous, layered landscapes. These settings merge archival photographs of the Cook Islands with Carrol’s own contemporary images, collapsing past and present into hybrid terrains that are at once intimate yet unkown.
Recurring motifs structure the exhibition. Four paintings show a brick falling across the sequence, suggesting the psychological and physical borders of land ownership—the uneasy thresholds between public and private space that reverberate across the trilogy. Another quartet traces the changing light as the sun recedes into darkness, a meditation on the passage of time. A diptych depicts four figures ascending Te Rua Manga, the sacred mountain range, invoking both the endurance of cultural knowledge and the weight of spiritual ascent.
Elsewhere, Carrol presents a shark—a sacred marine animal in Polynesian cultures— referencing the story of Ina and the shark. Displaced from its oceanic realm, it lies beached on a manicured lawn: an image of rupture, loss, and dislocation. Other scenes unfold in quieter registers: Avarua Bay at night, where the full moon (mārangi) drifts across the water, or a kiosk shutting down for the evening. The lunar cycle reappears in a painting of the crescent moon (oata), recalling the Arāpo, the traditional moon calendar that once structured daily life before colonisation. In these images, the moon becomes an axis of time, continuity, and return.
Two depictions of taro planters at work in their fields extend this meditation on cyclical time, grounding celestial rhythms in earthly labor. Binding people to land, sustenance, and ancestral memory, these works suggest that time itself is a material—fragmented, relational, and endlessly turning.
Throughout the exhibition, diptychs and paired compositions create quiet dialogues between figures, gestures, and spaces. Shadows lengthen, forms recede, and light becomes a structuring element—marking presence and absence, visibility and concealment.
Concluding the trilogy, Maru a’ia’i affirms Carrol’s ongoing project: to map memory, identity, and place in ways that resist closure. By collapsing timelines and foregrounding both everyday life and ancestral connections, these works generate a hauntological space where past, present, and future coexist—unresolved, unstable, and resonant with possibility.
