Home Is Where My Heart Will Rest

For Home is where my heart will rest, Chevron Hassett, Toi Pōneke’s 2019 Visual Artist in Residence extends his practice of whanaungatanga, delving into an integral commitment to the place closest to his heart, his home town of Naenae. This residency gave Hassett time to understand the intricacies and meanings of this feeling, and connect back to the people and places - the essence - of his childhood.

In creating work for this exhibition, Hassett collaborated with his peers from neighbourhoods in Naenae, engaging in one-on-one discussions around the idea of home, significant memories and connections to a locality, then developing individual video portraits, filmed in locations that expressed each person’s feelings of belonging to place, where ‘their spirits feel full’.

These new video portraits intimately explore ideas of locality, pause and momentary lived existence through the still filmic captures of Hassett’s people. Shown as three-channel installations, these works evoke intangible narratives of particular people and places. Hassett makes these works as sincere acts of support for his community and sees his people standing as living pou, courageous in their representation of Naenae, a place that has suffered social and economic hardships.

In conjunction with Home is where my heart will rest, the artist will also launch a series of works on buses traversing routes from Naenae through to Wellington city during the exhibition. Hassett grew up with his first creative works expressed publically as graffiti on buses. Harnessing this spirit, the artist sites portraits of young people of Naenae onto buses, as a representation of the mana and potential of Naenae and its people.