Rachel Rakena

Rachel Rakena’s ‘Mihi Aroha’ was exhibited at Scape in 2002, a tribute to her late mother it communicates ideas about identity and bi-cultural living. In this work projections of emails received after the death of her mother filter down screens like tears, the screens set in the form of a whare allow the emails to be seen from both inside and out. The personal nature of the language and the setting of a sacred meeting place contrast with the uniform procession of computed text filing down the walls. While showing no evidence of her mother’s hand or person it retains a strong human element. Mihi Aroha evokes passionate emotions through revealing personal messages; fleeting emails that could have been erased in an instant are elevated from their temporal status and transformed into an artwork. Rakena uses the impermanent nature of digital works and the internet to her benefit to emulate the fragility of life, looking at traces people leave behind.

The text in her work has undergone a long transformation. Formerly handwritten letters of sympathy have been replaced by emails, the emails then taken from the computer and projected onto the walls of a wharenui type structure. Past, present and future forms of community and personal communication come together in her work to allow a new form of engagement within the white walls of the gallery. P.s i have written about her work before which is why this is slightly more formal than the rest of my writing, it is in my own words.

I cannot find any footage of the exhibition but i do remember seeing a little bit of it. The use of emails as the text, giving them more importance by taking them out of their original context is what most interests me about her work. It looks as if you could walk through her work and see the inside walls. I'm going to write about it as if you could have done that because i have no idea... so, walking through her work you would walk inside the wharenui and see the same images inside and out. In a traditional marae the most ornate carvings and the tukutuku panels were all on the inside of the marae, which is shaped to resemble a person. Putting the inside outside is revealing all the personal things and sacred messages of sympathy for the world to see. It would be very moving to see because it is a subject with a lot of emotion involved. I think people might be a little apprehensive about walking inside it because of the calm nature of the work, I would like to just sit back and watch it play (it is about 2mins 30 seconds) before going for a closer look to read the text. It has quite a lot of space around it which would allow for this and more private encounters of the installation/projection.

The subject matter of my work has a lot of emotion involved for me but I find that revealing too much of that in the work is not the right approach, so i decided to go with something not quite light hearted but certainly more playful in the wording and where i was sourcing it from.