Āmene subverts and reimagines Neoclassical pottery conventions associated with Georgian and Victorian Britain. These societies – instrumental in the colonisation of Aotearoa New Zealand – are interrogated through the mannered forms of Hood’s whenua-based practice. 

An artist of shared Māori and Pākehā ancestry, Hood attests to complex and contested cosmologies through her ceramic forms. In describing her clay, Hood imagines a “catalyst” guiding the artist towards a clearer vision of colonisation in Aotearoa. Within Āmene, the ornamentation of a settler culture appears endless, so too, the influence implied through these Enlightenment forms. 

Amid the many – often misapplied – allusions of the Greco-Roman World, the Neoclassical Movement chose most of all to fixate on effigy, imagining civilisations in a cycle of Romantic decline. Attuned to this, Hood’s forms are reminiscent of funerary urns moulded through rough iron oxide – a material that, in the artist’s words – is “alive and resonant with the blood of ancestors.” 

Āmene contains a Māori voice speaking back through pākehātanga, with Hood posing new inventions among colonial and historised forms. A prayer arises through the clay, as spiralled bodies emerge and tend toward a future more-attuned to Māoritanga, and a ‘colonial inheritance’ is inverted towards the formation of nascent identity.