Star Gossage: Tauoranga Living, Existence

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.

Gossage completed a Diploma of Fine Arts at Otago Polytechnic, a pursuit influenced by her artist parents, Tilly and Peter Gossage, the latter an author and illustrator known for his children's picture books. She has cited Australian painters Arthur Boyd and Sydney Nolan as early influences in terms of their approach to painting myths and allegories of the land and bush. The fragmentary nature of Gossage’s work lends her paintings a dreamlike quality, where the images are not inert but instead constantly shifting. With her background in film and video, it’s tempting to read these interconnected images as something akin to a series of film stills.

With exhibitions throughout Aotearoa and overseas including recent surveys Kia Tau Te Rangimārie - Let Peace Be Among Us at Pataka Art + Museum (2022) and He Tangata The People at New Zealand Portrait Gallery (2020), the landmark exhibition Five Maori Painters at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki curated by Ngahiraka Mason recognised Gossage’s significance as one of the most important Māori artists of her generation.