Mark Maurangi Carrol

Mark Maurangi Carrol is a Māori Kūki Āirani artist from the Cook Islands. Born on Dharawal Country in Warrang (Sydney) in 1995, he lives and works on Gadigal Country in Warrang, New South Wales.

His practice interrogates memory, identity, and diasporic experience through experimental approaches to painting. Drawing on his upbringing between Australia and Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, Carrol explores the shifting relationships between place and belonging, using personal history as a lens to examine broader narratives shaped by colonialism, migration, and displacement.

Central to his work is a distinctive reverse-painting technique informed by both printmaking and traditional Cook Islands textile practices such as Tīvaevae and Pāreu. By applying enamel paint to the reverse side of loom-state linen, he allows pigment to permeate the surface, producing soft, layered images that evoke the fragility of memory and cultural transmission. His compositions often juxtapose island landscapes with elements of suburban life, bridging disparate geographies while engaging themes of fragmentation, nostalgia, and loss.

Carrol’s paintings navigate tensions between order and disruption, figuration and abstraction. Through this interplay, he challenges dominant representations of Pacific identity, instead proposing a poetics of dislocation grounded in lived experience.