Islands not to scale (ueata) – Act I

Islands not to scale (Maru a'o) – Act II is the second act in Mark Maurangi Carrol's three-part series exploring scale, representation, and diasporic memory from a Pacific perspective. Following his 2024 residency in Paris and return to Rarotonga in early 2025, Carrol examines light and visibility and how illumination can both reveal and conceal histories. The subtitle Maru a'o means "the shadows of the light of day" in Te Reo Ipukarea. The exhibition brings together paintings, sculptures, and installations that use scale as both subject and material. Small brick works suggest borders imposed by land ownership, while large seascapes assert Pacific expansiveness. Everyday objects—clotheslines, satellite dishes, palm stumps—appear detached from geography. Carrol draws on his own photographs and archival material: family members net-fishing, Te Rua Manga peak, and horses nearly extinct on Rarotonga. Sculptural works include stacked palm seed tins with painted-over advertising text, creating new sentences and contexts. An installation of five altered corned beef tins arranged as the Southern Cross reclaims the constellation as an ancestral Pacific navigational tool rather than an Australian nationalist symbol. Through layered gestures involving language, light, and material, the exhibition resists fixed narratives, offering a shifting cartography that holds memory, language, and landscape in constant transformation.