I Carry Your Love on My Back is an exhibition that explores care between relatives, and personal signifiers of home, protection, and wellbeing.
It comes out of several months of deep exchange between Melanie Tangaere Baldwin (Ngāti Porou) and Bui Duy Thanh Mai (Vietnam), who have been working to understand each other and their cultures. They have been introducing themselves by explaining the ways they experience and understand familial love.
Melanie stitches a family portrait onto a full-length WWF-style robe, intended to cloak a body with the invincibility of whānau.
Mai embroiders baby gauze with coloured silk threads that reference her own experiences of receiving đánh gió (coining or “beating the wind”) from female relatives. This practice leaves healing bruises on the skin of the recipient that trace the touch of a relative and indicate a body’s transition from illness to wellness.
Videos by each of the artists play out loud, calling back to the tv noise that floated around their upbringings in Aotearoa and Vietnam respectively.
I Carry Your Love on My Back is a mihi to Melanie and Mai’s families and the work that goes into keeping each other well. These pieces consider the ways that bodies are marked and transformed by care; they are tangible expressions of the complex love that circulates within families.
This project is presented as part of Jordan Davey-Emms’ curatorial internship, soft shell, which occupies Te Tuhi’s Parnell Project Space until March 2025.
Additional acknowledgements
The opening event is supported by Satellites.
Melanie Tangaere Baldwin and Bui Duy Thanh Mai first met during the 2024 Curators Tour to Vietnam, administered by the Asia New Zealand Foundation.
Bui Duy Thanh Mai’s travel to Aotearoa is supported by HOEA! Gallery and Project Space.
About the artists
→ Bui Duy Thanh Mai
Bui Duy Thanh Mai (Vietnam) practices art to view and converse with the world. Mai experiments with verbal and non-verbal mediums to explore themes of loss and (re)connection, intergenerational care, ephemerality, vulnerability, and gender.
Mai’s work involves the close reading of ordinary objects and daily phenomena, especially those relating to female experiences. She has recently taken up sewing, a technique which puts her at just the right distance to see the world and her own circumstances more clearly. Mai seeks to meditate and mediate between humans, suffering and their sentiments.
→ Melanie Tangaere Baldwin
Melanie Tangaere Baldwin (Ngāti Porou) is a māmā of two, a multidisciplinary artist, curator, arts educator, and is the former director/founding member of HOEA! Gallery in Tūranga Nui a Kiwa, Gisborne.
Melanie’s work is largely focused on Mana Wāhine, Indigenous and marginalised peoples, and the effects of capitalism, imperialism and settler colonialism on notions of power, beauty and worth. She is interested in expressing the necessity of connection, whānau, and community in her mahi. “I believe in the magic of creating and telling our own stories, of acknowledging the value of our lives and our whakapapa, and extending pūrakau as a means of contributing to a more beautiful and empowered future for our mokopuna.”