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.

In He climbed onto the lion’s back, it’s notable that there is no visible river yet water appears everywhere, including the moon, which is connected to the lapping tides of Te Awa Tupua. A glow radiates behind the boy’s head and his eyes peek over the lion’s head. Here, Townsend refers to the rematriation in 2025 of Te Hāmama, a carved tekoteko that belonged to Ngāti Ruakā, Townsend and her son’s people. Taken from Rānana Marae and ‘acquired’ by the Dominion Museum in 1912, it became part of collection at Te Papa Tongarewa. Te Hāmama has animated eyes and clutches his tongue—he looks mischievous.

In different hands, the symbol of the lion, so central to British heraldry and the identity of its empire, would risk becoming overwrought. But Townsend takes the lion as she meets it in place—Whanganui—and layers it by thinking through Maxey’s book and the childlike wonder of encounters not yet marred by knowledge of the darker aspects of our shared colonial histories. This is not to say that her work ignores the politically charged nature of Pukenamu Queen’s Park, nor the complicated histories of museums and galleries. Rather, she seeks to address and make legible the contradictions of Empire, and to destabilise easy dualisms while also demanding the right to opacity. This is not just a demand for the right to difference, but a means of thinking of the way opacities can coexist and converge.^[01]

∙

Townsend and her children, like all Māori, exist in a patchwork of encounters across the empire, yet this is not always in opposition to our Māoritanga. Townsend’s work summons the words of Ralph Ellison, whose novel Invisible Man drove her thinking when painting these works. In that novel the narrator asks himself, “What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?”^[02] Ellison is instructive here in understanding the ways in which Māori artists seek to make use of a double vision, as opposed to double consciousness.^[03] The latter is a term coined by the American sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois in his 1903 work The Souls of Black Folk. For Du Bois, double consciousness was a specific psychological challenge experienced by Black Americans, a two-ness. In one of his essays he wrote, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”^[04]

Last year I visited Great Barrington in Massachusetts, the birthplace of Du Bois. It was after this that I re-read the essay and underlined: “The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.” I thought about Aotearoa, even though I know Du Bois is speaking to a specific history of Black Americans, and how Māori have not yet found peace in the promise of Article III of te Tiriti o Waitangi. But in reading Ellison, Townsend instead opts for a double vision, wherein her work articulates the desire for expressive celebration and simultaneously a desire for effective resistance—to be opaque, to not just be split in two, but be many. Like Ellison, she utilises a sophisticated aesthetic lexicon to clarify the particular experience out of which she came. It is evident not just in the choices of colour, but in the recurring motifs of water, kōwhaiwhai, shells, the movement of the wind and, notably, the raukura (plume of feathers). Just as Ellison’s work envisions an escape from the narrator’s invisibility, as a quest that demands a heightened psychological and cultural awareness, so too does Townsend make a similar demand. Rather than feeling stuck in between in an ever-looping two-ness—Māori and Scouse—she is mobile in a hybridity that doesn’t sit in judgement of itself, but forms a whole.

Formally, across a number of paintings there is a horizon line or a water line, including in Rotokawau (2025), Beneath the Bridge to Nowhere the taniwha frolick (2025–26) and four others. Each is reminiscent of watching air bubbles reach the surface of the water and the way receding tidal lines mark the sand. I would argue that this lends itself nicely to complication and opacity, because they could be read as both the lines of raupatu and the confiscation of Māori land, and the cyclical relationality Ngāti Ruakā and all the people of the Whanganui awa have to the environment that has sustained them for generations. Again, this is a homage to Ranginui, whose photograph Suburban Melancholy (2015) presents a horizon line in front of homes flooded by the rising waters of the Whanganui. Taken after a devastating flood, it is both wero and whakaū. It’s a haunting image that illuminates the relationality the uri of the Whanganui awa have to their sacred waterways, by reminding us of the folly of humans in thinking that a body of water can be contained by borders or roads, or be crossed simply by man-made bridges.

∙

This show feels full, as silky as a veil or delicate hands gently scooping kina out of a jagged shell. This is in part because Townsend has worked for many years with woodworker Emile Drescher, but it also harks back to earlier work, especially her ‘veil’ pieces. In this series, Townsend created suspended veils out of discarded beach mats, which sway and move when encountering a gentle breeze. Each strand went through a process of being washed, and painted in multiple layers of pigment. Again, Drescher’s careful hand held these in place with a secure wooden horizontal across the top. These veils came out of a visit to Townsend’s tuakana, the contemporary adornment artist Neke Moa, at her studio in Ōtaki. Inside Moa’s studio was an expansive shell collection containing a number of matangongore (opal tops). By carefully unweaving these synthetic fibres, Townsend considered the physical expanse of the moana and created a wero, whereby we need to collectively understand how the introduction of foreign matter like plastic affects the moana.

Moa’s friendship is a reference point in Ūkaipō (2025), where, as in He climbed onto the lion’s back, Townsend depicts her son. In Ūkaipō, we see a scene where two figures exchange breath, one being the child and the other being the artist. The exchange of breath references pūrākau related to the first woman, Hineahuone, who came to life after Tāne Mahuta breathed into her the ‘tīhei mauri ora’ of life. Dangling from Townsend’s ear is a pounamu made and gifted by Moa, as an acknowledgement of their relationship. This is the first time Townsend has depicted human figures, but her son has recurred throughout her paintings, shapeshifting into shells, maunga and other symbols throughout her painting lexicon. Ūkaipō reminds me of the figures from childhood books by Peter Gossage and Pauline Kahurangi Yearbury, but I also ruminated on the book Te Kuia me te Pūngāwerewere, by Patricia Grace and illustrated by Robyn Kahukiwa. Above both Townsend and her son is a spiderweb, which speaks to the spiritual belief system of the people of Te Awa Tupua, but also to raranga, whakairo and the webs of whakapapa woven into place. The centre of the spiderweb also resembles a kina shell relieved of its spikes, as tapu messages are encoded within each layer, hidden in this spiderweb and only visible to those who know.

From the Lion’s Mouth is a culmination of her study of Māori art, including that of Robyn Kahukiwa, Pauline Kahurangi Yearbury, John Bevan Ford, Sandy Adsett and, most notably, John Hovell. Hovell’s influence deeply informed Townsend’s exhibition He Whare Ātaahua at Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga Hastings Art Gallery. At nearby Te Aute College, Townsend encountered the wharekai, painted by a group of students alongside John Hovell, who was both an old boy of the college and an art teacher. My Bird (2025) makes reference to this, through kōwhaiwhai patterns, although they are more sparse than those in the wharekai. The idea of birds in her work is two-fold—they are spiritual messengers, but also companion animals. The spiritual and cultural importance of birds is also explored in The Liver birds are home (2025), where we see the silhouettes of liver birds dancing together. Liver birds are mythical birds that haunted the medieval city of Liverpool. It is said that “the male and female pair were chained down to a building on the River Mersey, because if they were ever to leave the river would burst… its banks [and] would flood and destroy the city.”^[06]

In 1740 Liverpool overtook London and Bristol as the slave-trading capital of Britain, and dominated the trade across the whole of Europe. The River Mersey, where these trades occurred, holds this history, which is central in understanding a number of Britain’s cities—the indentured labour paid for the buildings, institutions and culture we see today. This complicated history is acknowledged in Townsend’s work, through the early influence of a number of Black British artists whose work she encountered, especially while at art school in Manchester. Here I am thinking of the paintings of Sonia Boyce, such as her four-panel charcoal, pastel and watercolour work Lay back, keep quiet and think of what made Britain so great (1986). In the background, red dots shift in and out of focus, while a wily spread of thorny black roses reaches across it, behind charcoal drawings of Christian crosses valourising the British Empire. These symbols of colonial conquering across three panels meet the gaze of a Black woman whose eyes, like Hāmama’s, stare back at us. Boyce, not unlike activist and artist Lubaina Himid, is famous for her collages and multi-disciplinary approach to art making. Placed alongside her considered study of Māori art, Townsend’s work conceives of the power of opacity in its empathy and in the inability to ever fully grasp or make legible the wholeness of a person or their work.^[07] While all these artists influence her work, she is not trying to recreate, but rather situates her work as a spiderweb attached to a bigger, murkier whole that words are insufficient to describe.

I first encountered Townsend’s work—and her ability to complicate narratives, and her use of bold textures and patterns—at Enjoy Public Art Gallery in an exhibition called Typical Relics in 2015. This body of work came out of a 2014 residency at WARE, in Beijing, where she witnessed the unstoppable flow of consumerism and created a series of LED light works that explored the construction of taste and the language of consumerism. These lightboxes featured Mandarin words difficult to translate into English. Alongside these works, Townsend’s musician husband Adam Ladley created a soundscape, made from field recordings during their time together in Beijing. From the Lion’s Mouth harks back to the glow of these lights and the warbling sounds that encompassed Typical Relics. However, her work at the Sarjeant in 2026 offers a soundscape in the form of an album by Cory Champion, a close friend of Townsend’s whose music is often heard in her home and studio. The bubbling water sneaks through the layers of veiled memories in Townsend’s paintings, which are delivered in rhythmic textures to unfold these layers of memories, some of which are her own and others that have been shared. Her brushes are those used by signwriters, a gentle nod to her father’s profession, and with her steady yet feathery-light hand she builds signifiers of place. Carefully, she builds a psychological space that knits together her relationships with people, places, memories and stories.