Star Gossage (1973, Ngāti Wai/Ngāti Ruanui) presents a veritable garden in this exhibition of recent paintings. Gossage visually transplants us to her whenua on a headland above Pākiri beach, north-east of Auckland. Nestled between ocean and river, the artist’s whare is located on ancestral land—a place rich in history and pūrākau—and a landscape that Gossage returns to again and again as both site and subject of her work. With their brilliance of colour and immediacy of line and brush, flowering buds, and blossoming fruit trees these paintings celebrate the cycle of seasons, overflowing with the abundant but fragile life that sustains and supports koanga and tauoranga. Amid subtle signs of intervention found in the cultivation and care of plants—and the handful of fresh-cut putiputi set in a row of vases—Gossage captures the wildness of her garden through effortless composition and application of paint.
