MARK MAURANGI CARROL

Background and Training

Born on Dharawal Country in Sydney and raised between there and Rarotonga, Carrol’s early life was marked by constant movement across land and sea, an experience that underpins his interest in migration, otherness, and belonging. His practice developed out of printmaking, a training that continues to inform his emphasis on layering, reversal, and transfer rather than straightforward depiction. Now living and working in Sydney, he has emerged through institutional exhibitions, gallery shows, and art fairs as part of a generation of Pacific-connected artists rethinking figuration and materiality in the region.

Carrol holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the National Art School, Sydney (2017), and was awarded the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship in 2023, which included a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. His growing recognition includes the Mosman Art Prize (2025) and finalist positions in major national awards such as the Sir John Sulman Prize (2024), the Wynne Prize (2025), the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize (2023), the Mac yapang Art Prize, the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award (2024), and the Bayside Painting Prize (2025).

Materials and Methods

Carrol begins many paintings on the reverse side of loom-state linen, bleeding industrial oil enamel through to the front so that images emerge as stains, veils, and partial silhouettes. This reverse-painting technique, developed from printmaking and Cook Islands textile practices such as Tīvaevae, Pāreu, and Tapa, gives his surfaces a soft, layered quality that mirrors the fragility and slippage of memory. Across these grounds he introduces fine drawing and short texts that sit between note and caption, signalling narrative possibilities without fixing a single reading.

Key Works and Series

In Sportstar (everything will be ok) (2023), shown in the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize exhibition at Bendigo Art Gallery, a cropped sporting body and palm motifs rise from enamel pools, suggesting aspiration and distant tropical memory while quietly undermining the heroic figure. Works such as Our house as it feeds you (2023), Portrait (untied shoes) (2023), s_outh of England (a captured you)_ (2023), and cathedral park (2023) extend this language across more intimate formats, juxtaposing domestic architecture, parklands, and isolated figures.

The ongoing project Islands not to scale (ueata) reimagines islands as shifting constellations of memory rather than fixed cartographic forms, unfolding over multiple acts in gallery and off-site settings. The trilogy Maru a’ia’i (“the shadows of the evening”) and Maru a’o (“the shadows of the light of day”) uses shadow and partial visibility to trace the passage from day to night, staging figures within thresholds where presence and absence, recognition and erasure, remain in tension.

Themes and Visual Language

Carrol’s work is often framed through “cultural hauntologies”: the ways histories of colonialism, migration, and family memory continue to insist on the present. Figures and motifs appear as overlays of different temporalities—digital traces, childhood impressions, and Pacific landscapes—rather than as linear stories, positioning his practice within wider discussions of post-colonial memory and Pacific sovereignty. Recurrent elements such as palms, sports uniforms, suburban houses, and parklands operate as triggers for associative memory and fantasies of escape or belonging, while cropped and interrupted figures signal the difficulty of representing diasporic identities from within.

Rooted in his upbringing between Australia and the Cook Islands, Carrol interrogates the slippage between place and belonging, using personal and familial histories as a lens through which to examine cultural narratives shaped by colonialism, migration, and dislocation. His paintings hover between legibility and opacity, inviting viewers to navigate what is remembered, forgotten, or withheld in both private and collective histories.

Exhibitions and Recognition

Carrol’s work has been exhibited widely across Australia and internationally, with presentations in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Auckland, Rarotonga, Shanghai, and Singapore. Solo exhibitions and focused presentations include projects at Sydney Contemporary (Carriageworks), Lismore Regional Gallery, Nasha Gallery (Sydney), and Melbourne Art Fair, alongside art-fair showings at Aotearoa Art Fair (Auckland), ART021 (Shanghai), and Gillman Barracks in Singapore. His work has also appeared in institutional contexts such as the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.upnext+6

In 2026 Carrol’s paintings were featured in the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Yield Strength at the Art Gallery of South Australia, curated by Ellie Buttrose, further cementing his position in contemporary Australian painting. He will also present new work in Primavera 2026 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, curated by Antares Wells, extending his ongoing exploration of light, shadow, and diasporic visibility.

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Ocula | 2026