Sefton Rani is of Cook Island heritage through his father. His work is an ongoing exploration of his Pasifika identity in the context of working class and industrial Auckland.

Sefton Rani sees his work as sculpting in paint to create a contemporary Pacific art, and refers to his works as ‘industrial tapa’. While influenced by the forms and mark making of traditional tapa, carving, tattoo, weaving and tivaevae, he eschews touristic Pacific imagery of hibiscus and dusky maidens for the industrial working-class reality of Auckland’s Pasifika community.

It fits within, or grows out of, the new Pasifika art Dr Karen Stevenson documented in her book The Frangipani is Dead: Contemporary Pacific Art in New Zealand, 1985- 2000 (2008), a product of the Pasifika diaspora, adapting to a new and very different urban context in New Zealand. It is an art that strikes a precarious balance between “where you are” and “where you’re from” and speaks across racial and geographical divisions.

Using the physicality of paint as his primary material, Rani creates his work from solidified paint skins in a process of investigating the sculptural opportunities of paint. It doesn’t just sit flat on a canvas, it bubbles, holds impressions, and imitates industrial surfaces, or simply exists as an object. His practice reflects the years he spent working in an Auckland paint factory, and both commemorates and elevates the otherwise ignored and unseen labour of Pasifika peoples in hard, manual jobs in Aotearoa.

The multiple physical and narrative layers created in each work’s journey empowers him to interrogate his ‘Pacificness’ while addressing universal themes. Rani’s materials are painstakingly arduous to produce, but Rani’s embrace of the intensity required for their manufacture is emblematic of the emotional weight and hyper materiality that the toil imparts to each piece.. The work pays homage to those who came before him and illustrates how labour is a material with value.

Rani states “Making gives me an opportunity to think. To think about heritage arts, think about my place in that lineage, how I feel the ancestors watching, how I strive to extend what Pacific art is.[It ] gives me a reason to research history … which is my way into understanding what it is to be an urban Polynesian as the information of the past was not handed down.”

Rani was selected as a recipient of the McCahon House Parehuia artist residency in 2025.