About

WE CALL IT HOME gathers fragments of memory, place, and material into a single surface. It draws from the 2005 government publication of the same name, which extensively featured Glen Innes and its history of state housing. Two decades on, the rhetoric of renewal persists while communities remain subject to liminal cycles of displacement and dispossession.

Through layered painting and printing, these fragments—textures, images, and objects that carry traces of home and place—are reconstructed to hold the tension between what is promised and what endures, between belonging and displacement, between the home remembered and the home erased.

As the face of Tāmaki shifts and new communities arrive alongside those long rooted here, the fragments insist that memory, identity, and belonging endure even as landscape and demographics change.

Alongside Marie's work, her students works will also be presented:
Benji Koroheke
Kendric Haru
Soyeon Pak
Van Ngoc Khanh Nguyen
Safira Hassan de Medeiros
Yuna Choi
Gia Choi

Exhibition opening Saturday 6 September 1pm

Marie Hemo Titi Mapa

Marie Hemo Titi Mapa (Ngāti Te Rino, Ngāti Hine; Hihifo, Niuatoputapu; Taunga, Vava’u) is a Māori–Pasifika artist based in Ōtara. Working across painting, installation, and community engagement, her practice explores identity, memory, and power from an urban Indigenous perspective. A 2024 BFA graduate of Whitecliffe College of Art & Design, she recently debuted her solo exhibition reclaim at The Good The Bad Gallery and Tātou in Glen Innes. Rooted in wānanga and the act of luva, her work creates space for collective storytelling, Indigenous knowledge, and cultural resilience.