‘The love of the whenua is a deep deep love. You open your heart to it and it rushes in, filling you up, lighting up dark spaces…. and all you can do is follow.

It’s a painful love, the love of the whenua – it takes a long long time’.

Represented in acrylic and enamel paint on canvas, this painting captures my first experience, one night fishing on Whangaroa harbour.

It is an attempt to reflect what I was seeing, feeling and sensing. An ‘internal landscape’ that is, the whenua seen through the heart and expressed through the creative soul.

Speaking in colours of midnight blue and purple – colour expresses what words cannot.

As the night settles over the whenua, insignificant and tiny, floating in a dinghy, I loose sight of all shape and form engulfed by darkness.

I close my eyes for a second and open them only to be hit with the force of the whenua.

Maunga, lit up like neon lights, their energy rising – radiating like beacons in the night showing me the way home.

The eyes of our tupuna poke holes in the night sky.

Because of them I am, because I am – they are.

In this moment my soulful imagination is ignited. A pataka of genetic memory and human experience triggered.

The maunga represented here, are Emiemi, Taratara and Ohakiri – iconic landmarks of Whangaroa hapu, symbolised here as silent sentinels and glowing kaitiaki.

The manaia filled pattern flowing across the painting symbolises Whakapapa, Wairua and Tupuna held within the Maunga, the maternal womb.

Whakapapa inextinguishable – It moves and flows, rises and falls like the water lapping against the side of the dinghy.

Purakau of Whangaroa, rich with metaphor, all connected to the world outside and inside of me.

The Blue Star symbolises cosmic knowledge held within us all.

Of rebirth, transformation, and the cyclic nature of our universe – Te Ao Hurihuri.

One night fishing, acrylic and enamel paint on stretched canvas, 90 x 45cm, April 2023.

A close up of Ohakiri and Emiemi in the background. Painted at Pupuke.

Taratara, mighty and magnificent.

The eyes of our tupuna are reflected here in the night sky.