Ockham Lecture: Contemporary Pacific Adornments with Dr Andrea Low

5.30pm doors, 6pm talk starts
Level One, Objectspace, 13 Rose Road, Ponsonby

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Join us at Objectspace for an Ockham Lecture with Dr Andrea Low.

Drawing primarily from contemporary jewellery and adornment in the Pacific collections at Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland Museum, and using indigeneity as an analytic tool and lens, this Ockham Lecture explores how Pacific jewellery and adornments express a sense of place in diaspora, and how they honour vernaculars of place, culture, and making.

It also considers syncretism – the amalgamation of culturally specific forms and meanings – in relation to Pacific jewellery-making in contemporary contexts, highlighting the ways traditional knowledge and lived experience intersect in new and evolving forms.

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Dr Andrea Low (Hawai‘i, Samoa, Fiji, Tongareva, Scotland) is Associate Curator, Contemporary World, at Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum. She co-curated the permanent exhibition Tāmaki Herenga Waka: Stories of Auckland, which opened in 2021, and is the lead curator for Mana: Protest in Print (Dec 2024–Oct 2026).

Andrea holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland, tracing the transmission of Hawaiian music in the Jazz Age across the Pacific and Asia, and an MA in sculpture from Elam, where she also taught for many years. She has taught moving image in Spatial Design at Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makau Rau Auckland University of Technology and is a regular contributor of articles and publications exploring the histories of Pacific peoples in Aotearoa and the wider Pacific. She is the editor of A Triad of Safe Keeping, on the work of artist Rowan Panther.

Her research interests focus on the entanglements of history, colonialism, indigeneity, biography, and diaspora. Andrea serves on the council of the Polynesian Society and as reviews editor for Waka Kuaka, the Society’s journal. She is also on the advisory board of Marinade: Aotearoa Journal of Moana Art and is Oceania reviews editor for Museum Worlds: Advances in Research.

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The Ockham Lecture series is an annual programme of lectures and panel discussions across different themes that critically engage with craft, design and architecture. This programme is supported by Objectspace's Lead Partner Ockham Residential.

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