Iteration 33 Be Happy
Liam Jacobson and Hanna Shim
Saturday 8th November 6pm
This iteration of our tendrilly project coils together the soft sculptural work of Hanna Shim and the heady words of Liam Jacobson, into a collaborative work, a portrait of Liam, and a tethering of Hanna to whenua.
Iteration 33 Be Happy, titled after one of Liam's poems, is a salve for your ulcer, a tincture for your condition. Perhaps it's a silly suggestion to Be Happy? or a light threat to Be Happy! but what better relief from these numbshock days, where the reigning paradigm doubles down squeezing us further and further into precarity, than to reimagine being happy.
Liam's words are accompanied by a protective suite of delicate silver manaia, and traces of their travels and of letter writing. The collected ephemera softly gauges the impulse to collect through moments of rarity and weirdness. Hanna has produced a pair of werewere-kōkako native blue mushrooms out of her fathers stained old jeans and shirts. Symbolising how her family has survived in this land, and running a laundromat, they tell a story of resilience and survival - of turning what's worn and faded, into something living and luminous. This dreamy iteration welcomes the weightless sporulation of local connection and togetherness, and the reciprocity of gift and friendship.
It is a delight to welcome Liam and Hanna to mothermother. Thank you to Taarn Scott and Rozana Lee for your respective invites... and so our river wends.
Liam’s work sails across different forms, to make sense of things, to ground research, to follow impulses and to play. Some of the works gently explore thoughts around nohaka, tohu, pedestrian-ship, note-taking, stones, alchemy and poetry :))
For Iteration 33 BE HAPPY, the works come together to disorientate and to uncover new connections in their spiralling. Some are to be rifled through and are presented alongside collected letter-writing materials.
Liam Jacobson (Kāi Tahu) is a writer and maker from Tāmaki Makaurau, raised in Manurewa. Liam has performed across Aotearoa and overseas, including recently at Blue Oyster (2025) and Kia Mau Festival (2025). They’ve written for a range of galleries, including RM (2024), Blue Oyster and Pātaka (2024), Te Tuhi (2023) and Te Uru (2023). In 2023 Dead Bird Books published their book of poetry titled Neither, and a second book will be published in early 2026. Liam is currently facilitating Puku as the curatorial intern for Te Tuhi’s Parnell Project Space at Parnell Train Station.
We mostly do have to work within our disorientation and distress to negotiate life ina human-damaged environment. We follow salvage rhythms… without the singular forward pulse of progress.1
In The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins Anna Tsing writes how Chinese immigrants living in California make a living by foraging for matsutake mushrooms, never knowing whether they’ll find anything that day, or if they’ll find enough to live off. To Hanna Shim, that precarity resonates deeply for her as an artist.
To make a living Hanna works full-time at an insurance company whose mandate is to protect their policy holders against loss. Anyone can join this risk-sharing model to control the unpredictable — if they can afford the premiums. It’s a constant negotiation of these bi-polar realities of security and uncertainty for Hanna.
Hanna has lived in Aotearoa for more than half of her life — first in Korea then here, but has always felt untethered as a first generation imigrant. Then last year Hanna’s aunt passed away and was buried on Tāmaki Makaurau’s east coast. In that moment when she was buried, Hanna’s relationship with the land changed, her whakapapa began. Now rooted the impulse to create native forms emerges. Ko au te whenua, ko te whenua, ko au.
For Iteration 33 BE HAPPY, Hanna redeploys her dad’s old blue jeans; a symbol of the working class, to express how her family has survived in this land. It’s a story of resilience and survival — of turning what’s worn, stained, and used into something living and luminous.
Werewere-kōkako, our native blue mushroom, is strange and timid yet brightly finds life indamp shadows.
1. Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World:On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, (Princeton University Press, 2015) 131.
Hanna Shim lives and works in Tāmaki Makarau. Born in Seoul, Korea, and raised in Auckland, Hanna identifies as a maker, working with various media to produce installations spanning soft sculpture, textiles, painting and moving image. Her practice is playful and delightful, at times whimsical and nostalgic but never far from the contradictory with imagery, objects, and stories drawn from her diasporic background. Hanna completed her MFA at Elam School of Fine Arts in 2015. She recently exhibited Answers to your Questions at Sanderson Gallery (2025), Pillow Garden at The Dowse Art Museum (2024) and Wishing You Well at Enjoy Contemporary Art (2022).