Mark Maurangi Carrol
Islands not to scale (ueata) – Act I
16 May –  8 June 2025

Works
Installation views
Press release 

Islands not to scale (ueata) brings together recent works by Mark Maurangi Carrol that were first developed during his 2024 residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and further refined on a return visit to Rarotonga earlier this year. The exhibition reflects on questions of scale, movement, and representation from a diasporic Pacific perspective.

The exhibition’s title originates from a 1980s Cook Islands’ tourism brochure, collected and given to the artist by his mother. The map it contained included a footnote, ‘islands not to scale.’ While intended as a factual disclaimer, Carrol adopts the phrase to interrogate broader misrepresentations of Pacific geography and culture; the region has often been understood through a continental framework that renders the ocean as an empty void, and islands as isolated, marginal spaces.

The Cook Islands (Avaiki Nui) occupy only 236.7 square kilometres of land, but span over 1.9 million square kilometres of ocean. Carrol’s work challenges the narrow spatial and cultural definitions imposed by colonial cartography by depicting the ocean as an equally integral part of the islands. In Te Manga (stay forever) we look up into a sublime landscape painted in thirds. Carrol, however, replaces the grounding bottom third with ocean; the foundation from which the mountain Te Manga emerges from. In second spring (gold), the figure pulls his vaka (canoe) from a sliver of land into the water, bridging and removing the gap between land and ocean.

The works on paper were created by painting within a cardboard template of the artist’s passport, a legal document that represents systems of access, mobility and belonging, which in turn shape diasporic experience. Over time, the template broke down, and the images began to extend beyond its borders. This physical deterioration became a structural metaphor for the instability of national identity, and the artist’s own transformation each time he leaves or returns to home. The linear seven exhibited works on paper symbolise each journey by the artist to Avaiki Nui and mirrors the complex, and often uneven effects of movement, displacement, and homecoming.

Carrol’s journey back to Rarotonga in January 2025 generated the photographic material for the exhibition’s linen paintings. These images were drawn from the everyday; landscapes, seascapes, fishing scenes and family life, but they defy any documentary realism. Instead, they function as postcards, fragments of a personal archive, a visual journal of return. The works are produced using a method inspired by pāreu printing, where pigment is applied from the reverse side of the linen, allowing it to soak through the support. This process softens the image, and reveals parts of the fabric itself, creating a partial record that resists resolution. The paint rests in between the warp and weft of the linen support, and changes in saturation as the viewer moves and digests the paintings; mirroring the nature of memory itself, layered, selective, and often incomplete. 

The figures in these paintings are rendered in silhouette or with minimal detail. Carrol uses this abstraction to shift focus away from individual identity and towards collective experience. Historically the silhouette has served as an accessible and economical form of portraiture, particularly before the advent of photography, but here it is used to explore presence and absence without imposing a fixed meaning. These anonymous figures act as placeholders; not only for the direct audience, but for broader histories of migration, labour and family. 

The subtitle ueata references a term from Cook Islands Māori that was once used to describe the early photographic practices introduced by colonial settlers. It translates approximately as ‘to capture shadows.’ The concept resonates with Carrol’s methods of working with light and surface. It also signifies the critical stance his work takes toward the role of visual documentation in colonial contexts; in the Pacific photography was often used to catalogue and to objectify. In contrast Carrol’s paintings are not acts of capture, but of interpretation. They are built through memory, layered over time, and intentionally open to ambiguity.

Throughout the exhibition, the question of representation is central. These works do not seek to reconstruct a stable or complete image of the Pacific. Rather, they present visual fields shaped by fragmentation, omission and reassembly. The tension between what is visible and what is withheld parallels the experience of diaspora, where cultural knowledge is often mediated through partial access to land, language, and history. We can see Carrol’s own understanding and knowledge being directed by matrilineal guides in The daughters of Ina (Kite). The progression of four female figures in the forefront is beckoning and guiding the artist through the complex maze of navigational starry sky, moon phases and trees. They all face the same way and gesture towards the same point, giving the artist a clear directional intention.

Carrol’s work engages with what theorist Jacques Derrida terms ‘hauntology’, the persistence of unresolved pasts within the present. His paintings are marked by overlapping temporalities; ancestral memory, colonial history, and personal experience. Rather than illustrating these histories overtly, the artist suggests their ongoing influence through formal choices, layered surfaces, blurred boundaries, and abstracted figures. The past is not positioned as a discrete point in time, but as something that continues to conjure perception and belonging, now and into the future.

In both process and content, Islands not to scale (ueata) challenges the inherited frameworks in which the Pacific has been depicted, and attempted to be understood. Rather than relying on spectacle, Carrol’s approach is foregrounded by lived experience and critical engagement, which offers an alternative mode of mapping; one that values connection, memory, and multiplicity. By drawing on his own archive and cultural background, Carrol invites viewers to consider how visual practices can reflect the complexities of place, identity, and history beyond singular representation.



Text by
Viktor Kravchenko and Ella Fraser