Tracing unseen maps of history: Ioana Gordon-Smith interviews Jasmine Togo-Brisby
22 Oct 2025, Ioana Gordon-Smith
This article first appeared in The Post on 22 October 2025
This article first appeared in The Post on 22 October 2025
Pātaka Art+Museum recently launched both a book and an exhibition, each titled ungeographic, on the work of Australian South Sea Island artist and former Wellingtonian, Jasmine Togo-Brisby. Australian South Sea Islanders are the Australian-born descendants of people brought to Australia between 1847 and 1904 as ‘indentured labourers’, mainly to work in Queensland's sugar and cotton plantations. Ioana Gordon-Smith, Pātaka Lead Curator, is behind the book and the exhibition. She spoke with Jasmine for The Post.
JTB: You! Lol. Nah, having a mid-career survey exhibition wasn’t something I actually ever considered, let alone where it might be. But when you asked me, it just felt right – like one of those full circle moments – especially because you were the first curator to show my work in Aotearoa, at Te Uru in Auckland in 2016.
JTB: The younger me, who worked at a jewellery store in the Porirua mall for four years, could never have anticipated having this exhibition – or all that ungeographic is.
JTB: The earliest work in the show is Bitter Sweet, which I started making in 2015 while I was at Queensland College of Art. Seeing it at Pātaka, together with my other works, makes me realise my thought process hasn’t changed during that decade. Back then, I just didn’t have the language or confidence to push back against the institutions and advocate for myself and my work.
JTB: I’m pretty excited that all the works are in one place; in conversation with each other. If I had to choose, it would be Ceiling Centre, which is a wall-hung plaster work that mimics a ceiling rosette, and As Above So Below, which is a fully immersive spatial installation. These two are drastically different in scale and display, yet they both articulate the same methodologies on space and ornamentation.
It’s gratifying to see that if a visitor doesn’t quite understand one of these works on its own, having the two of them ‘echoing’ back and forth to each other brings forward other facets, which may have been too subtle when just looking at an individual work. This echoing is happening all through the exhibition – ironically, it’s a kind of ‘mapping’.
JTB: I make my work to create space for South Sea Islanders and generate dialogue, inserting Australian South Sea Islanders and the Pacific slave trade into the context of global enslavement.
I work with the manipulation of space and the impact an architectural feature, for example lighting, can have on human emotions. I get a range of feedback from visitors – they usually have some kind of emotional response to my work. It varies from delight to sadness, guilt or anger. I can’t control what they feel, all I know is that I want them to feel something. I used to hope for a lot, but I’m happy if visitors find the will to sit with their emotions, whatever they are, and consider why is it they feel that way.
JTB: I have a few things on in Australia, the UK and Europe. The one I’m able to mention is a five-year research project with German and Australian academics and curators to examine the histories of the Western-Pacific’s Anglo and German plantations.
ungeographic continues at Pātaka until 9 November.
Order a copy of the book here.
