For over a thousand years, Emily Karaka’s forebears watched the stars’ slow journey above the ancestral mountains, the tūpuna maunga of the isthmus Tāmaki Mākaurau. As they crossed the sky, they told the people when and where to plant, what to plant, and how to harvest that bounty.

This knowledge was as deep and fecund as the volcanic soils that nourished the region’s many populous communities, ensuring significant wealth and prosperity. This knowledge is the compelling substance of the exhibition Matariki Ring of Fire. Lineage—or whakapapa—records and celebrates the relationship between the human and celestial realms, a relationship Karaka explores in this series of paintings.

The works were painted following her time as the first McCahon House Artist in Residence of 2021. In the late 1970s, Colin McCahon recognised Karaka’s talent and thus mentored her early career. Staying at the residence Parehuia, next to his own sanctuary, Karaka was embraced by the dappled, moist and splintered light of the Waitākere forest. Here, ideas began to take shape. Working later in her own studio, she called down the power of Matariki, the star cluster known to the West as the Pleiades, to create this sequence of colour and form, texture and memory. She also located the works within the Pacific Ring of Fire, invoking the connections of blood and lava that flow beneath the currents of Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, the Pacific Ocean, linking the indigenous peoples who dwell within that circle.

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Fourteen mountains comprise the main section of the exhibition; they stand with dignity and purpose, each one beneath a swirl of starlight, a takarangi spiral of energy and motion, merging with each summit, spinning from a vortex of deep purple, violet and indigo. Every small white star, brightly defined, moves forward then recedes, dancing above a stately mountain.

Karaka has chosen a limited palette. Below the layered density of dark sky looped with unfurling bands of colour, she presents the green lushness of the maunga as they must have appeared generations ago. The shine of pounamu, glowing nephrite slopes of terraced vegetation, strong fortified sites defending verdant peaks, and, on the lower levels, bountiful māra, or kūmara plantations, neatly and naively delineated. Some maunga meet the sky with a flickering line of red—firelight declaring occupation or vigilance, or revealing the residual embers of an enduring eruption. Other maunga show off their natural adornment, sometimes spectral, almost ghostlike: the shadows of tōtara and kauri, the more substantial presence of toetoe, nīkau, tī mauku, harakeke—plants familiar and beloved to this day, plants that sustain human life. And a few maunga reach down to a sheen of deep blue harbour, luminous with potential.

Every maunga is named and honoured; every maunga has his or her own special story; we are introduced to ancestors like Maki, Kiwi Tāmaki, Hape, Taikehu, Wairaka, Hoturoa, and offered a sense of their mana, their power, in times long gone. Many of the names are still around today; they resonate in the hearts of their descendants, and, in a more mundane way, they mark sections of the metropolis of greater Auckland. They have not faded; they stay with us—mau tonu, mau tonu.

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Effectively and authoritatively, this exhibition memorialises and reclaims these tūpuna through the physicality of their maunga, beneath the stars, beneath the influence of Matariki. The ahi-kāroa, the heartening flame that proclaims ongoing presence, and relationship with the land, never ever goes out. Like the stars, this light continues, a primal energy.

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