In my teenage bedroom, at my great-grandfather Paul’s house in Liverpool, there was a small ‘memory box’, a repurposed rosary bead box containing broken treasures that had belonged to his wife, my Irish great-grandmother, Anne Murphy. Her life and subsequent death were wrapped in mystery and pain. There was a knowledge withholding—or ‘kaiponu’, to use a Whanganui expression—around her story. The only clues I had of the woman whose ‘eyes were my eyes’ were fragments of shiny adornments and waxy pictures of unnamed yet familiar figures. I would frequently review the bitsy sacred mess, wondering if the items were indeed precious to Anne or made precious through her absence from them.★☆★Trying to make sense of her life through residual matter—and its mauri, its life force—presented me with a way of seeing that reached beyond the everyday, beyond anything that I had been told about her reality and this one. The signs and symbols, the tohu, had no obvious order or set of instructions. I had been presented with a room in which I could speculate about the inter-possibility of things on an exaggerated and deeply personal scale.★☆★The title Thin Places reflects the ushering into my art practice of my Irish heritage and its mythologies—particularly the idea of an invisible divider, a thin place that touches time on one side and eternity on the other. I have previously explored Māori conceptualisations of this through tactile veil works that reimagine te ārai as a fluid barrier between physical and spiritual realms. This show is my way of connecting multiple whakapapa lines through shared spiritual positions. I explore the unseen and unspoken dimensions such as time-travel and intergenerational knowledge to examine how mythology-building can happen through material, as well as oral or written, transferral.