Mirror Aotearoa

At the heart of the holocaust museum at Yad Vashem, preceded by a dark, spiral corridor, are 6 candles in a pitch black room lined with mirrors. Their reflections are a universe of stars in space. Sometimes when my father shifts his weight or combs his beard it is as if he is multiplied like the flame at Yad Vashem so that the palimpsest of his animated form becomes visible. When my father moves, every nuance and articulation of gesture echoes back through generations to his roots in a village in Lithuania. These are the moments and gestures that cause time to slip and he is caught standing between 2 mirrors and the present is a locus from which the past and future radiate.

Mirror Aotearoa was a project sponsored by the Lithuanian Days Arts Festival, the Lithuanian Council for Culture and the Lithuanian Society of New Zealand. An exhibition of selected work from the late 1990s to the present that focussed on my family’s ties with Lithuania.