Ms.Interpreted

Finally got to see Lottie Consalvo’s Cigam at Föenander Galleries. It was an absolute highlight for me to write the accompanying text for this beautiful show.

A little extract from We Were Never Just Weeds:

“Cigam turns magic backwards, asking us to reverse our assumptions: to pause and give our attention to what we have learned to disregard, dismissing it as ordinary, useless or inconvenient, and to wonder whether what we call magic might instead be an ability we have forgotten. For Consalvo, this question extends a practice long concerned with the entanglement of interior life, nature and the unstable territory between what can be seen and what can only be imagined. […] The paintings inhabit this threshold between the known and the mysterious, where a flower might carry a message, an ordinary object become charged with energy, and the body itself contain faculties we have yet to awaken. Magic becomes a way of opening our perception, inviting us to reconsider whether some of what we call impossible is instead a part of ourselves we have simply forgotten how to access.

What begins as a flower rooted in one place becomes hundreds of tiny travellers, each seed carried by its own parachute towards another life and possibility. Here, dispersal becomes the magic of letting go. It is a call to pay attention. The unknown may already be growing beneath our feet. And perhaps the real magic is discovering that we were never just weeds.”

Although I’m missing the artist talk and book launch this Saturday because I’m away, it was an absolute pleasure to hang out and spend time with Lottie at our house. And a highlight for Frida to have her toenails painted by, probably by now, her favourite artist. 😂💅

If you’re around this Saturday, go see the show and catch Lottie Consalvo for the artist talk and book launch at 2pm, Saturday 3 October, at Föenander Galleries . Can’t wai to get my copy 🌼

The latest issue of Ceramics New Zealand, has dropped! 💫💫💫

I live with and love ceramics, so being able to spend time with David Austin Aotearoa (Ngāti Rangitihi, Te Arawa) and write about his work has been such a privilege. At the heart of the piece is kaitiakitanga, and the way Dave’s vessels become expressions of connection and responsibility to the living world:

“Kaitiakitanga, often translated as guardianship, speaks more profoundly to reciprocal responsibilities between people, whenua and the wider living world. This understanding is central to Austin’s practice, where vessels become material expressions of care. As environmental crises intensify globally, kaitiakitanga has gained increasing recognition because it offers an alternative to ideas of ownership and extraction. It describes a way of living grounded in custodianship, where humans exist within enduring networks of obligation to the earth. ‘I am from whenua, I will return to whenua,’ he says. ‘Whenua is my life.’ Throughout his practice, clay becomes a way of thinking with the earth: an encounter where design, cultural knowledge and elemental forces meet.”

Huge thanks to Becky Richards and Ceramics Association of New Zealand (Inc.) for the opportunity to write about an artist whose work asks such important questions about making, whakapapa, and whenua. ⭐️

A fleeting weekend on Waiheke, mostly spent under a determined blanket of rain. No swimming, but an excellent excuse to duck into Waiheke Art Gallery for Lucky Dip.

Curated by Richard Maloy and presented in partnership with STARKWHITE , it’s exactly what its name promises: a joyful mix of colour, wit and visual mischief. 😉

I particularly loved John Reynolds’ quirky, funny works, including several clever nods to the island itself. Fiona Pardington’s monumental kākā was a highlight, especially given these parrots have properly returned to Waiheke and their gloriously screechy calls can now be heard around the island. Seung Yul Oh’s painting was another standout, as was his very cheeky monkey sculpture, demonstrating its own particular interpretation of downward dog.

So lovely, too, to see my buddy Jamie Te Heuheu’s paintings in the mix. Almost impossible to photograph properly, which feels appropriate given how much of their pleasure is in the surface: the dense, tactile quality of the paint, colour and texture. 🩵

Alongside these were works by Mikala Dwyer, Martin Basher, Ani O’Neill, Andrew Beck and Jonny Niesche. A really vibrant, generous and very fun show.

I’ve been writing quite a bit about the Venice Biennale lately, for various international publications, and it has made my eye wander back to some of the pavilions that have stayed with me.

The Spanish Pavilion was particularly wonderful, where Oriol Vilanova presented Los restos (The Remains), curated by Carles Guerra ✨✨✨

Vilanova has been collecting postcards for more than twenty years, picking them up in flea markets and second hand shops. His collection now numbers more than 200,000, with around 50,000 arranged with a carefully curated eye onto the walls of the pavilion. What initially reads as an overwhelming mass of images gradually reveals itself as an extraordinarily intricate system of classification. Landscapes, architecture, objects, animals, monuments and all manner of other subjects sit alongside one another, while colour and tonal relationships create these strange chromatic waves across the rooms… almost resembling a kind of painting. A collection within a collection within a collection.

In a world where we are producing and consuming an almost incomprehensible number of images, I’m increasingly interested in this return to the analogue. Perhaps like a lot of people, I too am drawn to nostalgia. I thought about this particularly because I have my own small collection of postcards, including a series I inherited from my maternal grandparents after they died, from a trip they made to Potsdam. They are such ordinary objects, but holding them now feels like holding a tiny piece of their world. A postcard carries something an image on a screen rarely does: a record of where you have been, and of who you thought of while you were there. ♥️ 💌

A lovely chat with perlinalau for Culture 101 on RNZ , aired yesterday, talking about Sefton Rani’s Clear My Throat at The Arts House Trust .

Thanks for coming to visit us. Great to spend some time talking about the exhibition. 🌺🌺🌺

The interview is up on my Linktree in the bio if you’re interested. 🎧

I don’t want you to think my entire week was about disappointment.

Things did, eventually, take a turn. It did involved the regrettable but necessary removal of a small army of sluggy and snaily beasts from the garden. Let’s just say I discovered reserves of resolve I didn’t know I had. It reminded me of this beautiful new work by Turumeke Harrington : A Good View from the High Road. It now sits, quite deliberately, on the bookshelf above my desk, where I write.

Keeping it company: Gregor Kregar piggy bank, overseeing the mahi and reminding me that writing should definitely result in actual coin, and Paul Maseyk beautiful, very hungry mouth jug, which feels appropriate for several reasons.

Perhaps my complaining was heard by the right people, because my darling Peter Bell picked a gorgeous bunch of spring freesias. They smell incredible, and they’re now looking very happy indeed in the 2026 Subscribe to receive vase.

Happy spring, everyone. Sometimes you just need a reset. 🌺🌹🌷🌸🌱🌿

On Sunday I spent four and a half hours in the garden: pulling weeds, planting seedlings, replanting dahlias and lilies, making space for a future version of myself who will sit outside with friends, eat things from the garden, and feel very pleased with all this effort.

The next morning, the snails and slugs had eaten almost everything.

I was disproportionately devastated.

But then I thought about Matisse’s The Snail, which I photographed badly in July 2018 while spending a week at Tate Modern as a Tate Intensive Fellow. Made during the final years of his life, when illness had left him wheelchair bound, it belongs to the period he called his “second life”: working from his bed, cutting and arranging colour with scissors when painting became physically difficult.

The snail is enormous, joyful, unruly. Its spiralling pieces of colour feel like a manifesto for carrying on.

Maybe that is what I needed reminding of this week. That not everything has to become a future reward to have been worth doing. Four and a half hours in the garden was still four and a half hours of being outside, moving slowly, getting my hands dirty, making something.

Anyway. I have bought more basil. We persevere. 🐌

What a wonderful way to spend a Sunday evening.

Last night, Paul Ubana Jones played an intimate concert at The Arts House Trust , surrounded by Sefton Rani’s Clear My Throat. The gallery space felt was quite magical, with the artworks and the music occupying the same space and somehow changing the way you experience both.

And that version of Norwegian Wood was probably one of the best I’ve ever heard.

Thank you, Peata Larkin , for such a thoughtful gift. A beautiful setting, beautiful music and a lovely evening with friends. Art and music worlds colliding in the best possible way ♥️✨

What an absolute treat to spend an afternoon at Brick Bay Sculpture Park, hosted by the wonderful Rachael Lovelace , with my darling friend Peata Larkin ✨✨✨

The landscape is extraordinary: carefully planted gardens, native bush, winding paths and that particular feeling of being properly out in the world for a few hours. Time vanished! ✨✨✨

It was such a treat to bump into some works by my favourite artist friends while we were there. Feeling completely energised, inspired and very lucky to be part of this little art ecosystem.

If you’re heading towards Matakana, or coming back from up north, put Brick Bay W**e & Sculpture on your list. Give yourself an hour or two, or better yet, give yourself the afternoon. Spring is here and the food is exceptional.

Such a good day ♥️

I was so happy to finally see Nephi Tupaea’s Assimilation in person a couple of weeks ago at Tim Melville Gallery . The colour! The luminosity! The way these paintings draw you in before you realise just how much history, whakapapa and complexity is moving through them. What I love most about this body of work is the way Nephi Tupaea enters the space between the Western canon and Māori lived experience and makes something entirely her own. It becomes a wonderful way of connecting past, present and future art history, folding time in on itself.

As I wrote in ART NEWS : “Tupaea’s work insists that the only honest position is to sit with discomfort, to hold contradiction as a threshold. What lies beyond is another way of seeing: a story of the people in the paintings told from within their own lineage, in colours that hold complexity without flattening ambivalence. Without correcting or replacing the colonial narrative, she does not paint over Gauguin, Vermeer, or Ingres. She enters the vā between their world and hers and produces something that depends on both while belonging fully to neither.

Nothing here is separate from how the work is made. Tupaea is her mother’s full time carer. She paints in the intervals caregiving allows, on smaller canvases, at a pace shaped by māmā’s healing rather than the demands of the art world. In Te Ao Māori, art is not separated from life or responsibility; it is lived.”

I am very grateful to Art News for the awesomest assignment, and especially to Nephi for such a generous conversation about the work and the histories held within it. ✨✨✨✨

Assimilation is on view at Tim Melville Gallery for the remainder of this week, closing Saturday 12 September. If you are in Tāmaki Makaurau, go and spend some time with these paintings. Let yourself be seduced by the colour, especially in these early days of spring. 💛