Hiria Anderson-Mita (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Apakura, Rereahu) was raised in her grandparents’ home in Te Rohe Pōtae the King Country and continues to live there, in her whānau homestead in Ōtorohanga.
Hiria paints meticulous, situated portraits of the people from her community in their environments, revealing the subtleties of Māori life and culture in the 21st century. In her practice, where she often works on up to 30 paintings at a time, particular themes, subjects and motifs are not perused separately, they come to the surface and coalesce over time.
This exhibition follows Hiria to key locations, that she visits often, to see what the people in her life are up to. We follow her on a privileged journey into her world that takes us behind the scenes to witness the everyday joys, banalities, and struggles of a rural, tight-knit community. While focusing in on the details of hapū life, Hiria’s paintings extend out to provide commentary on much larger intertribal issues and politics of the day.
Her work interrogates the history of representation of Māori within the European painting tradition and as Lucinda Bennett observed “shifts the viewpoint from outside looking in, to inside looking at each other.” In this way she lends her voice to legacy of resistance and nuance asserted by Māori artists who have come before her.
