For the exhibition Jacqueline Fahey: Say Something! (22 November 2017 – 11 March 2018) this work was displayed with the following label:

Fahey’s husband, the noted psychiatrist Fraser McDonald, held positions at a number of institutions throughout New Zealand, and they raised their three daughters in a series of houses on hospital grounds. In Porirua, the gardens were overseen by a patient, Mr Quickly (also known as Speedy), who had studied at Kew Gardens in England and worked on a royal estate. He supplied the family with a steady supply of produce and fresh flowers. Fahey recalled that she could cope with the flowers but that the fruit and vegetables, which he clearly expected her to make into preserves, showed up her shortcomings as a ‘proper’ doctor’s wife. When the family moved to Kingseat Hospital, near Auckland, Mr Quickly came with them. This painting, a study in warm autumnal colours and dappled shadows, celebrates what Fahey described as 'the light he brought into all of our lives'.

At a time in her career when many might have expected her to slow down or even retire, French-born Louise Henderson embarked upon one of her most ambitious creative projects. The Twelve Months distilled her impressions of her life in Aotearoa New Zealand into a dozen tall canvases, filtering the rhythms of the year through her ‘abstract poetic of nature’. Borrowing their proportions from the elegant ‘double square’ of her studio windows, they combined two important aspects of her practice: the all-seeing viewpoints and organisational principles of cubism and the ability to use colour to evoke both form and atmosphere. Often inspired by the view through her window, Henderson manipulated a complex set of variables, considering how the seasons affected the weather and landscape, the changing light and position of the sun, and the fluctuating activities, rituals and moods of people in both the city and the countryside.

In the ‘winter’ months, June and July, Henderson skilfully balanced colour, form and movement to evoke rain-laden clouds, drenched fields and cold, boisterous winds.

A shroud of moths, their outlines cut from National Geographic magazines, rises up around this frail blackened skeleton. Gripped between its teeth is a golden coin, like those the ancient Greeks inserted into dead people’s mouths as ‘Charon’s obol’, a ritualistic payment for the ferry ride to the underworld. Peter Madden’s vision is deeply macabre, but not without humour or the hint of renewal. Springing from this decaying figure’s feet are werewere kōkako, the bright blue native mushroom named for the kōkako bird’s famous wattle – reminding us that death is part of a cycle that repeat endlessly over time.

(Dummies & Doppelgängers, 2 November 2024 – 23 March 2025)

Despite the force, heat, pressure and noise implicit in the bronze melding process, Rosemary Johnson’s tectonic Shadows 4 is filled with an expansive, majestic fluidity, and holds together with an ordered sense of tension, strength and grace.Johnson became skilled in traditional metal casting processes at the Central School of Art and Design in London, after earlier studies at the University of Canterbury’s School of Fine Art. Returning to New Zealand in 1969, she became particularly well-known for her environmental art.

(As Time Unfolds, 5 December 2020 – 7 March 2021)

English-born Eileen Mayo had lived in Aotearoa New Zealand for twenty years when she made this screenprint of young fern fronds in the lush native undergrowth. One of her final prints, it combines her enduring appreciation of the natural world with an extraordinary technical ability, conveying not only the graceful beauty of the plants she depicts, but a strong sense of their place within a complex and interconnected ecosystem. The sight of fern fronds in the act of unfurling provided the inspiration for the Māori koru, a powerful symbol of perpetual creation, growth and return.

(He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil, 2025)