Artist Statement

Born in 1981, RAB is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture, mixed media, photography, moving image and the written word. His practice is informed by his paternal Māori whakapapa — his iwi is Ngāi Tahu — and by his maternal Slavic ancestry, rooted in the folklore and spiritual traditions of the Balkans — which operate in the work not as fixed identities but as living systems of memory carried through material, ritual and mark.

The works are built through complex layering. Photographic foundations establish a ground of the visible world, which the artist then scarifies — incising written language and symbols into the surface in a technique that draws on whakairo and tā moko, the Māori traditions of carving the record of ancestry into skin and wood. These inscriptions stage a tension between an interior voice and the imposed language of structure, conditioning and inherited belief: the surface becomes a site where the two contend.

Found objects are woven into the compositions through hand-stitching and traditional weaving practices, thread-like passages that bind disparate materials into relation — a physical enactment of the understanding, common to both of his ancestral cosmologies, that objects carry presence, memory and energetic charge. Figurative forms complete the works, existing not upon the surface but within it: spectral presences that occupy the threshold between energy and form, the seen and the unseen.

Across the practice, existence is approached as energy rather than form. Desire, grief and ancestral memory move through generations and materials alike, remaining active long after their source has disappeared. Each work functions as a field in which these charges accumulate, contend and transmute — proposing a world that is not observed passively but continually brought into being through perception itself.