Landscapes 2024

For some years now, my paintings have been exploring a connection to the New Zealand landscape, that, as someone from a colonial heritage, I didn’t feel was mine to fully embrace – but then I received some surprising DNA results…

It turns out, I have a different biological father than I thought, revealing Māori ancestry that connects me to the Ngāi Tahu people of Te Waipounamu, the South Island of New Zealand, an area with some of the most glorious, mountainous landscapes in the country.

The sense of belonging I was searching for, through the repeated motif of the lines and shapes of the hills in my work, was finally realised. This flipped my point-of-view, from that of an outsider looking in, to someone with a genuine ancestral connection to the hills of New Zealand.