In 1938 Louise Henderson taught art at Rangiora High School for half a day each week. While there, she painted a series of eight mural panels for the local nursery school. These depict rural life over the four seasons of the year. In 2023, Rangiora High School generously gave the panels it held to Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū.

In 1938 Louise Henderson taught art at Rangiora High School for half a day each week. While there, she painted a series of eight mural panels for the local nursery school. These depict rural life over the four seasons of the year. In 2023, Rangiora High School generously gave the panels it held to Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū.

In 1938 Louise Henderson taught art at Rangiora High School for half a day each week. While there, she painted a series of eight mural panels for the local nursery school. These depict rural life over the four seasons of the year. In 2023, Rangiora High School generously gave the panels it held to Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū.

The richly textured surfaces of Tracy Keith’s raku fired ceramics contain the imprints of abstracted shapes and patterns. His work is informed by the way ancestral relationships with the whenua are often disrupted or fractured by the need to move away from one's turakawaewae. He says his works “come from a place of memory for me, where they are parts of the earth or areas of the whenua I remember or that I have experienced. I want to capture the deep rawness and movement of uku, where material informs practice and the raku process defines the outcome, where vessels look as if they were pulled from the earth.”

whenua ~ land, placenta

tūrakawaewae ~ place where one has rights of residence and belonging through kinship and whakapapa

uku ~ clay

Drawing on his Kāi Tahu and Chinese whakapapa, Ōtepoti Dunedin-based artist Simon Kaan has often meditated on te maramataka and the concept of place and belonging in both te ao Māori and Taoist cosmology. In Te Au, a waka floats small beneath te marama, the moon. Kaan refers to this curved form – a recurring motif in his practice – as a ‘wing-tip’. Part canoe, part feather, it is also a reference to the rock art drawings made by his tūpuna. The word au holds many meanings in te reo Māori but, as artist Bridget Reweti has noted, in Kaan’s work the one that seems most fitting is the wake of a canoe – a metaphor for how each person’s passage through life ripples outward.

Kāi Tahu ~ tribal group of much of Te Waipounamu South Island

whakapapa ~ genealogy, lineage, ancestry

te maramataka ~ the Māori lunar calendar

te ao Māori ~ the Māori world

waka ~ canoe

tūpuna ~ ancestors

te reo Māori ~ the Māori language

He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil (from August 2024)