Ranad

Ranad

Ranad belongs to a broader body of investigation considering sound and its relation to duration and memory. Treating sound as a dynamic, living force, Songsataya’s works trouble the routes by which ephemeral vibrations and utterances find themselves translated into visual form.

Ranad’s form references the Thai percussive musical instrument of the same name. Its base is constructed from Taranaki andesite (carved by Taranaki-based carver Donald Buglass) and Ōamaru stone, upon which sit found onyx and marble eggs, as well as plant matter which was gathered by and gifted to the artist during a period spent living in Taranaki between 2023 and 2024. Here, various measures of time and transformation coalesce—from the skins of orange and kiwifruit, remains of substances which nourished the artist; to residues of relationships the artist formed contained within gifted dried plants; to the remnants of violent volcanic activity and tectonic shifts embedded within andesite; to the skeletal fragments of prehistoric foraminifora which make up the structure of Ōamaru stone. Songsataya’s approach to material works to push against Western philosophical assumptions that would consider stone inert, lifeless and unmoving. Instead the artist insists on the liveliness, agency and capacity for transformation held within earthly materials.

This was work commissioned in 2024 as part of the exhibition Fibrous Soul, which included works by Songsataya and Maata Wharehoka (Ngāti Tahinga, Ngāti Koata, Ngāti Apakura, Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Kuia). Attentive to locally specific forms of knowledge, to forms of cultural practice embedded in Thailand—the place of Songsataya’s birth—and to the ethics, responsibilities and questions stemming from their position as a tauiwi artist working upon Māori land, Songsataya’s works within Fibrous Soul sought to make porous boundaries between states of being— proximity and distance, vibrancy and inertia, life and non-life.

— Simon Gennard
Adapted from Fibrous Soul exhibition text, 2024