Heidi Brickell, Zena Elliott, AJ Hope, Maioha Kara, & Nadia Marychurch

Pūtahitanga brings together new and recent work by contemporary Māori artists Heidi Brickell, Zena Elliott, AJ Manaaki Hope, Maioha Kara and Nadia Marychurch. Across painting, whakairo and installation, the exhibition considers whakapapa as something active and lived: carried through whenua, taonga, language, mātauranga and inherited kōrero.

The title Pūtahitanga speaks to a meeting or confluence — a convergence of distinct practices without being collapsed into a single narrative. Ideas move between the personal and ancestral, the material and cosmological, and across different understandings of wā — time and space — in which past, present and future remain in relation.

Throughout the exhibition, materials and processes connect place, memory and lived experience. Uku, onepū, harakeke, timber, woollen blankets and painted and carved surfaces are worked through gathering, binding, stitching, carving and painting. Guided by tikanga and tohu, the works draw on pūrākau, te taiao and experiences of kāinga, while opening onto questions of identity, belonging and how knowledge is carried and transformed across generations.

Together, the works in Pūtahitanga understand connection as an ongoing process of gathering, remembering, making and bringing different histories, materials and ways of knowing into relation.