Do you remember being a child, and the way your games became layered with magic? My daughter often comes to me after drawing to explain the hidden pūrākau inside her apparent scribbles. A single line can delineate between worlds and across oceans. Perhaps it’s a taniwha? NO! It’s a mermaid who’s lost her necklace, and she needs the fish to help her find it in the pirate ship! She’s wearing several pieces of my grandmother’s costume jewellery, and has put her favourite (but dirty) dress back on. I can’t help but grin at her sense of confidence in herself and her energetic imagination. I’m not sure at what point in my own child-hood I lost this sense of magic and absolute conviction of the otherworldly being present, but I try to encourage this mode of thinking in her for as long as it will last.
Jade Townsend’s (Te Āti Haunui-a-Pāpārangi) new exhibition From the Lion’s Mouth, showing at Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery, speaks to this world of play and imagination by framing her body of work around a childhood book, Jane Maxey’s Charlotte and the Lion (1985). In this book, a drop of water on the nose of the lion in Pukenamu Queen’s Park in Whanganui brings the animal to life. Like all good children’s books, it has an element of unease: what if this lion isn’t friendly?
As a teenager, Townsend left Whanganui and moved to Liverpool in the UK, and in From the Lion’s Mouth she has produced a series of 13 paintings that intimately and always serendipitously reveal her whakapapa. Her work exists in a nexus that speaks across islands, and the veins of water that link them together. For Māori, the relationship to our awa (river) is paramount to our understanding of where we belong, and Townsend’s paintings allude to her relationship with both Te Awa Tupua (the Whanganui River) and the River Mersey in Liverpool. They entwine the diaries of her mother, the diamond-encrusted craftiness of her nana, the eyes of a tekoteko and her son’s cheeky pūkana. Bubbling on the surface of each canvas are the sprawling waterways contained in both her body and her whakapapa, particularly the whānau-oriented narratives from around Whanganui, including Rotokawau Virginia Lake, the wishing wells dotted around the city and the Higginbottom Fountain. Whakapapa expresses a horizontal interrelation of all things, given its translation into English could mean simply ‘to layer’. Townsend is aware of how this layering can be represented on the surfaces of these paintings and the inter-generational layering is without any hesitation; each brushstroke and whakapapa layer unified in care and thoughtfulness. From the Lion’s Mouth is Townsend’s most personal body of work; it is also not intended to be representative of Te Āti Haunui-a-Pāpārangi nor of Whanganui as a whole—it is first and foremost a body of work about her experience of being from and returning to Whanganui.
In the centre of a rectangular, elongated room sits the central pou of the exhibition, He climbed onto the lion’s back, to practice his Hāmama eyes (2025–26). In reference to Maxey’s book, and the drop of water that brings the lion to life, the artwork contains dribbles of water and snow; lichen swirls below the lion and shimmies off a moon. Townsend’s son climbs onto the lion’s back, giving us a mean pūkana. A spiky crown appears behind him, which is countered by the billowing waves of his black-blue hair and the lion’s red-purple mane. The colours are muted but iridescent. The spiky crown feels like a subtle gesture to the work of Townsend’s whanaunga, Tia Ranginui, who showed The Virtue of Athens (2024) at Townsend’s commercial gallery, Season. In that photograph, we see a woman in a red satin dress with puff sleeves, standing on a floating kayak on a river, holding a paddle, with a crown atop her head. Most of her body is in shadow and her gaze meets ours. The figure in the photograph is a mutual friend of both artists, Whitney Nicholls-Potts (Ngāti Kuri, Muriwhenua), who appears as Charon, ready to carry the dead across the River Styx.
