Star Gossage, NGĀ ONE HAEA O PĀKIRI, THE GLEAMING WHITE SAND OF PĀKIRI, 2024, oil on canvas, 945mm x 1560mm

“This exhibition features new paintings from sisters Aroha, Ra, and Star Gossage (Ngāti Wai, Ngāti Manuhiri, Ngāti Ruanui, Te Āti Awa) and an original illustration from Peter Gossage.

The Gossage children grew up between Pākiri and Auckland’s North Shore. The clay and mud of the river provided the girls with their first materials and a visceral connection to the whenua. Their marae is Ōmaha, near Te Hāwere-a-Maki (Goat Island), site of the old pā where Rahui Te Kiri and Tenetahi lived after they were expelled by force from Hauturu and where they are buried in the urupā. This marae is where Star, Ra and Aroha came together for a painting wānanga in the wharenui, overlooked by images of tūpuna, to devise the kaupapa for this exhibition.

These places form a potent physical and spiritual papakainga, as nourishing as the fertile māra where they grow an abundance of food, with their older sister Marama and brother Tahupotiki. Pākiri is somewhere they can be ‘safe and free,’ Star says. ‘Free to be ourselves.’ This is rare, she acknowledges, for Māori and for artists.

In the work shared in this exhibition, place is explored on multiple levels: realist, psychic, schematic, organic. The landscapes are loaded, expressing beauty, mystery, loss, growth, and personal as well as iwi history. Human figures may be fully realised or spectral or disembodied, expressing a fundamental truth about papakainga as the centre of both daily life and the deep past.”

— Paula Morris MNZM (Ngāti Wai, Ngāti Whātua, Ngāti Manuhiri) is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, essayist and editor.

Opening event: Thursday 30 January, 5pm