Jade Townsend
b. 1986
Selected works
Installation views
Press release
Roots & Wings
30 October – 29 November, 2026
Since returning to Aotearoa New Zealand in 2020, Jade Townsend (Māori (Ngāti Kahungunu, Te Āti Haunui-a-Pāpārangi), Pākehā (New Zealand European), British) has developed her painting practice through an exploration of the pūrākau (stories), imagery, and memories associated with the places she calls home. Her connections extend across the motu (nation) and beyond—from Whanganui, where she was born and raised, to Takapuna Beach, where she now lives, and Liverpool, England, where she spent much of her youth. These locations, their stories and Townsend’s whakapapa (genealogy) layer together in Roots & Wings, considering the many identities she holds and embodies simultaneously.
In Aotearoa, our nation’s bicultural paradigm exists as an ever-present hum. For those with both Māori and Pākehā whakapapa, the intersecting responsibilities and individualities that result from this meeting of cultures can manifest in complicated internal territories. Roots & Wings presents an alternative interpretation—celebrating the people and experiences that have shaped the artist and her whānau (family) and illustrating the profound shift that Townsend’s thinking about hybridity and multiplicity has undergone through motherhood.
For a long time, my art practice served as a psychological third space—a site for overflow, discarding and miscommunication, where all the non-translatable parts of myself could land. Becoming a mother sparked a major reimagining of this space. Watching my children embody the complex tensions of belonging to multiple places and cultures—and carrying themselves with such pride—challenged the notion that cultural hybridity was a scene of debris. Instead, it collapsed all those chambers of thinking into one abundant space where everything is taking place at once, where there is more than one truth or language or homeland.
This abundance animates Roots & Wings. Space and time fold together, figures and symbols hover between worlds—slipping between land and sea, night and day, the familiar and the fantastical. Townsend conjures dense compositions, where images emerge from layered fields of colour and pattern. Vibrant radiant glimmers are countered with earthly tones of concealment. We glimpse through veils of rhythmic marks and translucent forms, the canvas withholding as much as is revealed.
There are evocations of Townsend’s son, Hayes-Ānaru, enveloped in iridescent blue. Puanga, a star associated with the Māori New Year, shines in a violet sky. Nets of stitches and shells stretch across the glow of the moana (sea), while Hina, the moon goddess, appears in her changing phases, offering guidance and solace. The Liver Bird, a guardian figure associated with Liverpool and the River Mersey, meets the kuaka (godwit), whose extraordinary migration connects Aotearoa with the northern hemisphere. Their feathers become delicate, interwoven patterns, bringing distant geographies into intimate contact.
Fine strokes trace the lines of tā moko (tattooing), while others evoke mauri (life force) and breath, or suggest threads—fluttering, looping, weaving. At once intimate and expansive, each composition rewards sustained looking, the surfaces seductive and elusive, animated by a tension between order and freedom.
Love letters to those Townsend holds close, these paintings are imaginative territories in which different histories, identities and ways of understanding the world coexist. Each connects back to the important places of her past and present, the physical and spiritual whare (houses) that ground her understanding of self. Home is not simply a geographical location, but something carried within us, shaped by relationships, memories and stories. Townsend’s paintings are portals to glimpse this cosmos, a sensory and elementa architecture that holds the ancient and the future together at once.
This exhibition, Townsend’s first solo show in Australia, comes as she and her whānau prepare to settle in a new city, in another homeland. The paintings offer both an anchor and an invitation to travel. They honour the whenua (lands) and people who have nurtured the artist, while affirming the enduring power of image-making to connect us, loop by loop, layer by layer, across distances, generations, and realms.
Text by Zoe Black (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Hine, Pākehā)
