Open Window Exhibition - O

Exhibition: 9 Jul — 7 Nov 2022
'O'
In the Open Window, Te Whanganui-a-Tara-based artist Emerita Baik presents a new installation.

Made up of a series of soft sculptures, based on the form of carved wooden Mandarin ducks often gifted in pairs at Korean wedding ceremonies. Mandarin ducks mate for life, and will mourn for their partner after their passing. As a gift, the ducks contain wishes of wealth, health, fidelity and fertility.

Baik’s ducks are constructed from fragments of hand-dyed and painted fabrics and wrapped in bottari - a method for bundling goods for gifting or migrating. Baik’s materials are redolent of domestic comfort; of making home and finding rest. In their arrangement, though, the ducks gesture to a sense of displacement, motion, and the lived experiences of existing between cultures and languages.

About the artist:
Emerita Baik is an artist based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Massey University. Her sculptural works explore the relationship between language, abstraction and materiality, as informed by the experience of living in between the cultures of Korea and Aotearoa.
Recent exhibitions include 'The inner lives of islands', Te Tuhi, Pakuranga 2021; 'Bedrock', The Physics Room, Ōtautahi Christchurch (2021); 'The fairy and the woodcutter', Robert Heald Gallery, Pōneke Wellington (2020); '꿈', Enjoy, Te Whanganui-a-Tara (2020); 'I love more than two loves', RM, Tāmaki Makaurau (2019); and 'EOmma', Toi Pōneke Arts Centre, Te Whanganui-a-Tara (2019).