On the margins of language
Ruth Minh Ha
Te Marunui Hotene & Thom Hinton Te Ata Pō, 2026 Graphite on paper 297 x 420
On the margins of language is a commissioned essay by Ruth Minh Ha on the occasion of Te Ata Pō by Thom Hinton and Te Marunui Hotene.
One of my favourite works in Te Ata Pō does not hang on the walls but lies humbly on the office shelf. A namesake of the exhibition, it’s a collaborative drawing started by Te Marunui Hotene and sent to Thom Hinton to complete. Hotene’s poupou stands proudly in the centre, the taniwha’s mouth cradling two of Hinton’s birds and making the unexpected convergence of their distinct visual languages explicit. Meticulously shaded pītau and mangōpare run in parallel to the braided links of Hiberno-Saxon knotwork, forming an interlocked lattice whose elements, despite the harmonic interweaving, are deeply rooted in distinct cultural practices.
The lattice extends across the exhibition, bringing together different strands of each artist’s wide-ranging practice: Hinton’s plaster tablets and gestural landscape painting, Hotene’s intricate abstract drawings and burnt rākau sculptures. In Bleak Wolds, 2026, a spiralling border surrounds a buon fresco landscape, echoing the geometric patterns that once illuminated the Lindisfarne Gospels. A similar threshold is created by the manuka frames around Hotene’s drawings, carrying the protective associations of his mau rākau practice and the care put into each step: slowly blackening the rākau with fire, cooling it in the awa, giving it a name.
Thom Hinton Bleak Wolds, 2026 Charcoal, graphite, oxide, buon fresco 255 x 310
Te Ata Pō offers an encounter with the intimate side of these artists’ practices, often not seen on gallery walls but maintained in the privacy of the studio. Throughout each work runs a sense of diligent returning, time and time again. Built in thick layers of impasto over three years, Smiling Purple, 2026, was pulled out of storage every autumn. Hinton tells me that he never set out to make a black painting – in its early stages, the canvas was brimming with vibrant colour. While the darkness lends it a gentle stillness, it refuses complete concealment; and the light peeks through its shroud, like a world slowly waking.
Smiling Purple is a dramatic departure from the restrained tablets I’m familiar with. The mark-making becomes much looser, more gestural, as Hinton works on a drastically larger scale. In his studio, he uses the word ‘bodily’ – although it is hard for me to think of any line Thom draws as un-bodily. Even the most controlled, carefully etched linework is impossible to separate from the lines he has made at the studio across the hall, on my skin and many others’.
Thom Hinton Smiling Purple, 2026 Oil, charcoal, oil stick on linen 1020 x 1520
Opposite Smiling Purple are three works by Hotene which bookend a decade of his life. Mana wahine and Whakaaro nui, both made the year he graduated from art school, sit beside Taku pōhēhē nui, from earlier this year. The decade saw Hotene move back home and immerse himself in family life and te ao Māori, learning his reo and mau rākau. His practice branched out too: into murals and skateparks, realistic drawings of scenes at the marae, and burnt rākau sculpture. Here, though, the focus is on the meditative intimacy of his drawing practice: hours spent quietly and methodically filling sheets of paper with pencil and ballpoint pen. There is something diaristic about them, the way I imagine them fitting into any free moment of his life. Flipping through a folder of Hotene’s works, I come across a note on the back of a 2025 drawing titled “Attack my flesh” – defend yourself:
Dad came back from mahi today, paid Wiremu $800 for car repair. dad day off apōpō for mum’s hip replacement. Kahu & Pare at home. Jords had mahi. made John come over for a sesh today.
This is a rare instance of literal storytelling in the exhibition, with other narratives symbolically encoded. One of the recurring motifs is the dynamic, twisting form of the taniwha, which for Hotene is both a kaitiaki and a way of speaking to the tumult of finding yourself. The titles hint at this too: Rangirua, 2026, means to be in doubt or uncertain, and Taku pōhēhē nui, 2026, stands for ‘my great misconception’. Other references to kōwhaiwhai motifs, like the pītau (young, unfurling shoot of a fern) or the mangōpare (hammerhead shark), gesture to long-standing storytelling traditions that do not rely on written language. Instead, knowledge is woven into the fabric of life, transmitted through pūrākau, through aute, through the walls of the whare whakairo.
Te Marunui Hotene Taku pōhēhē nui, 2026 Pencil on paper, burnt Mānuka frame 300 x 400
The soft gradation in Rangirua and the waharoa form in Taku whare kōrero, 2026, make me ask Hotene if he has ever thought about carving. He laughs; apparently, his dad – a carver – has been pestering him about the same thing, urging him to materialise the designs in three dimensions. I feel a little bashful about my question, misguided by the lingering connotation of drawings as provisional. Perhaps it’s the medium’s accessibility that makes for a fertile testing ground, stringing along an implication of something more permanent to come. For Hotene, the drawings are permanent enough.
Hinton, too, draws on ancient traditions of storytelling encoded in non-textual mark-making. Retaining an ongoing fascination with the marginalia of medieval manuscripts, he extends his temporal scope to Bronze Age rock art. The cup-and-ring symbols – rendered in Bleak Wolds in buon fresco, a medium that seems almost modern in comparison – are thought to have functioned, thousands of years ago, as mnemonic devices or symbolic maps of the surrounding environment.
Another cosmological diagram that Hinton looks to is Saltair na Rann, which lends titles to two works in the show: the Smiling Purple painting from earlier in the text, and Babbling Dun, 2026, a delicate pink landscape rendered on a half-plaster, half-canvas support. Saltair na Rann is a tenth-century classic of Middle Irish poetry, and includes a chromatic map of the cosmos:
From the East, the smiling purple,
from the South, the pure white, wondrous,
from the North, the black blustering moaning wind,
from the West, the babbling dun breeze.
Eleven centuries later, the rationale of each colour-direction pairing remains a mystery. Sure, the cold northern wind blusters and moans, but what makes the wind a smiling purple, or a babbling dun? I ponder this for days, trying to think of what or who came to the Irish from either direction. Instead of settling on an answer, my mind keeps drifting to a te ao Māori counterpart, Whakataka te hau. It’s a well-known karakia that, like Saltair na Rann, gives character to the directions of the winds – and, quite fittingly, speaks of te ata pō and the first rise of a red dawn piercing the light.
Whakataka te hau ki te uru
Whakataka te hau ki te tonga
Kia mākinakina ki uta
Kia mātaratara ki tai
E hī ake ana te atākura
He tio, he huka, he hau hū
Tīhei mauri ora!
Portrait of Ruth Minh Ha, 2026
Ruth Minh Ha is a writer and curator based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Of Russian and Vietnamese heritage, she was born in Moscow and relocated to Aotearoa in 2015. She studied Art History and Computer Science at the University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau and in 2023 was the recipient of the Michèle Whitecliffe Art Writing Prize. She is currently an assistant curator at Gus Fisher Gallery, and has previously worked as a curatorial assistant at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.