Magenta: Labour, Desire, and Care      

Under Rongomaraeroa: Harvest, Fertility, and Making

This tableau gathers textiles, stone, pigment, and adornment through magenta and purple, colours long carried by Indigenous women’s labour, extraction, and ceremony through cochineal dye. At its centre are works by Indigenous queer artists whose practices foreground intimacy as knowledge. Māori artist Tayla Hartemink’s illustrated print Te Pakanga o Pōhutukawa draws from the cosmology of Rongomaraeroa, atua of peace, cultivation, and fertility. Rendered through Māori visual languages, the work situates the body as threshold and source: harvest, whenua, and generative sexuality held together through the opening of form, where entry, growth, and sustenance converge.

That embodied cosmology resonates across the arrangement. Aroha Millar’s body jewellery names nipples and anus as sites of sovereignty rather than shame. ARIA XYX’s ceramic flower-penises and clay cicadas speak to systems rendered fragile by violence yet enduring beneath its surface, holding persistence rather than collapse. The cicadas echo those heard and seen in Jamie Berry’s Kihikihi across the gallery, extending sound, time, and memory between spaces. José Luis Fernando Morales’ amethyst, pearl, and silver necklace carries Maya adornment knowledge through contemporary desire, while Trama Textiles’ woven faja, marked by birds and flowers, quietly mirrors the avian and vegetal forms recurring in Berry’s moving image. Mario López Vega’s stone-pigment work returns Panchimalco land to the surface.

Together, these works refuse separation between spirituality, pleasure, and survival. This is an altar where Indigenous futures are cultivated through softness, erotic agency, and shared making.