Te Rarawa artist Ana Iti has won the prestigious Walters Prize for her Hokianga-inspired sculptural installation, ‘A resilient heart like the mānawa’.
The 35-year-old graduate of Ilam School of Fine Arts in Ōtautahi, Christchurch was announced as the winner of Aotearoa’s leading contemporary art award and $50,000 cash prize at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki on Friday night.
When she was first nominated, Iti described the feeling as a “wild experience” on Instagram.
Her installation reimagines the structure and surroundings of Rāwene wharf, replacing concrete piles for steel and reducing its boardwalk to a network of kauri timber beams.
“This new work came from a desire to spend time and make work in Hokianga-nui-a-Kupe —a place of arrival and departure— and to think about the wharf, a structure that stands between the land and the sea,” Iti who was born in Blenheim and now lives in Hawke’s Bay wrote in July.
International judge, Professor Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung of Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, likened Iti’s installation to “great poetry”, singling it out for the top prize for the “radicality of its manifestation”.
“Stripped to the bare minimum, the work shares something in common with great poetry: the ability of accessing multiple universes through the availability of a few words,” he said.
Professor Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. Source / HKW Belin Instagram
“The concreteness of metals of the de-concretised wharf infrastructure that stand majestically in the gallery express the weight of histories of industry, of extractivism, of capitalism, of the colonial enterprise and of connections in Rāwene that was transformed into a timber town with a mill and shipyards in the early 1800s. While in a very delicate balancing act, the kauri timber floats almost unhinged over the heads of the visitors.”
Iti was a nominee for the 2024 Walters Prize alongside Brett Graham (Ngāti Koroki Kahukura, Tainui), Juliet Carpenter and Owen Connors.
“Four absolutely brilliant artists of different disciplines and practices, different generations, different sociocultural and historical affiliations, but at the same time excelling similarly in the depth and breadth of their arts,” Professor Ndikung said.
“This has been a true blessing.”
Iti joins a distinguished group of past Walters Prize winners including Māori artists, Mataaho Collective - Erena Baker (Te Ātiawa ki Whakarongotai, Ngāti Toa Rangatira), Sarah Hudson (Ngāti Awa, Ngāi Tūhoe), Bridget Reweti (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi) and Terri Te Tau (Rangitāne ki Wairarapa) - and Maureen Lander (Ngāpuhi) (2021), Ruth Buchanan (Te Ātiawa) (2018), Shannon Te Ao (Ngāti Tūwharetoa) (2016) and Peter Robinson (Kāi Tahu) (2008).
Iti’s ‘A resilient heart like the mānawa’ is on display at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki until 20 October.
“[It’s] kind of hard to capture the work in photos, please go and visit in person if you get the chance,” Iti said earlier this year, when her art was first installed at the gallery.
“He mihi maioha ki toku whanau i tae atu ki Tamaki Makaurau ki te tautoko te whakaaturanga x.”