2026 Landscape Paintings of Piha
Oil on board
9 pieces
An exploration of Piha in Tamaki-Makaurau, this series of nine oil paintings looked to subvert the colonial gaze of conventional landscape painting by layering emotion, memory, embodied being, and time. To view land as object, as image, is to distance oneself from the world, to turn the landscape into something ‘other’, not something humanity is a part of. Through this othering, violence and disregard become more palatable. A return to affective, sublime feeling, as evoked in Landscape Paintings at Piha, can deepen our perceptions of self and land beyond the purely ocular, planting an empathetic, awe-inspired desire for protection and care. From the original site sketches, studied only in their details, an iterative drawing methodology was followed to deepen the observation and relationship to place. A melancholy dissolution was studied through the poetic material of water, its iridescent, wild surface and abyssal depths. Shadows gather in layer upon layer of glaze, their contrast with the texturally opaque reflections forming a depth of field that reaches for the sublime.
Charcoal and watercolour on paper
21 Pieces
Group exhibition
2021 A Green Shade, Sanc Gallery
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.
Excerpt from The Garden by Andrew Marvell
Using poetry as a mechanism to establish a site of study, this group exhibition recorded individual artist responses to two poems, Pa mai to reo aroha by Keri Hulme and an excerpt from The Garden by Andrew Marvel. Contemplations on imagination and perception used poetry as a tool to access others' atmospheric relationships to physical and mental landscapes. These poems were unfurled through multiple artistic evolutions to form the inception of sculptures, paintings, and drawings. New landscapes were created, layered with multiple perceptions.