past work / past shows 

2018

For the Empire

Anna Miles Gallery

Auckland, New Zealand

2015

Workers in Dirt

Silo, Park / Wynard Park

Auckland, New Zealand

2017

MŌ TE EMEPAEA
–For the Empire

Tairawhiti Museum

Gisborne, New Zealand

Departure Lounge features a series of works by four award-winning artists who have spent the past year creating what they describe as “loving tributes” to the hotel, whose owner Maureen Gordon passed away this month. The Kings Arms is one of Auckland’s oldest hotels and has long been the city’s home of live music. Its demise will be felt by crowds who have flocked to bands as beloved as the White Stripes and The Black Keys, and who recall some of New Zealand’s wildest onstage gigs. The idea for the exhibition was conceived on a night watching Peaches perform on stage. Says painter Jean Stewart: “Knowing that the noise and old wooden floor vibrations would wind up soon was quietly defeating. All the people that had moved through the place, the effort, the energy, the audience, the walls, the carpet;it all 

demanded acknowledgement.” 

​

Tawhai Tamepo, a Maori Pioneer Battalion veteran of Waipiro Bay, in a series of war diaries, has recorded beautifully and clearly the moments worth remembering. 

His words so measured and polite describe both the horrors of war and the adventures they got to have around the edges of it. The diary moves along from scene to scene like a movie. In this way it seems a very visual record and transposes into images very readily.

I have endeavored with these paintings to depict the images Tamepo documents and present them as memories.

So that the viewer will feel the nostalgia and the dream like quality as they travel through his recordings. The image is there but seen through the fog of time. After all, these events have been re-written by Tamepo himself then remodeled again in paint by me to be presented as shiny little gems of memory, shaking in the wind but still here.

These are paintings of people who spend their everyday lives growing food, in community gardens and small market gardens. This series had a focus on Plein-air painting. The process was to take the canvas into the garden, set up and paint on site. Surrounded by plants and people, working them into edible things. There is a documentary element here a desire to capture an essence of daily life. Also a desire to honour the hard work and amazing achievements I have observed in these people and gardens.

 

Embedded within both the process and the finished

works is the notion of the everyday. These paintings

are painted in the garage

and constructed from things left over from everyday

life or within reach of

the subject matter, i.e. available to someone experiencing the early stages of motherhood. The effect is that the paintings begin to operate asan extension to daily life rather then being separate from it. To imply meaning within these basic assemblages is to apply meaning to daily life.

 

– Thesis extract for the degree of Masters of Design

 

2012

The Nuances of Human Stories

and the Language of Paint

Te Po Gallery 

Auckland, New Zealand