7.3

THIN PLACES

Jade Townsend
Jade Townsend
20.03.24–19.04.25
Season is proud to present Thin Places by Jade Townsend (Ngāti Kahungunu, Te Āti Haunui-a-Pāpārangi).
The exhibition comprises paintings and large-scale sculptures that are connected through an evolving narrative of dual consciousness. Archetypal entities from a range of cultural and spiritual contexts—including rosary beads, a silver spoon, koru, and whetū—have been brought together to be read in different ways. There is a sense of a treasure box, a gathering of keepsakes, a deck of tarot cards. The show creates a space for the exploration of futurisms and transcendence.

Artist statement
‘All prickly with crosses, all covered with inscriptions, all spaded up and shaken by countless daily burials, we are charged with the transmutation, the resurrection, the transfiguration of all things. For how can we save what is visible if not by using the language of absence, of the invisible?’—Rainer Maria Rilke
In my teenage bedroom, at my great-grandfather Paul’s house in Liverpool, there was a small ‘memory box’, a repurposed rosary bead box containing broken treasures that had belonged to his wife, my Irish great-grandmother, Anne Murphy. Her life and subsequent death were wrapped in mystery and pain. There was a knowledge withholding—or ‘kaiponu’, to use a Whanganui expression—around her story. The only clues I had of the woman whose ‘eyes were my eyes’ were fragments of shiny adornments and waxy pictures of unnamed yet familiar figures. I would frequently review the bitsy sacred mess, wondering if the items were indeed precious to Anne or made precious through her absence from them.★☆★Trying to make sense of her life through residual matter—and its mauri, its life force—presented me with a way of seeing that reached beyond the everyday, beyond anything that I had been told about her reality and this one. The signs and symbols, the tohu, had no obvious order or set of instructions. I had been presented with a room in which I could speculate about the inter-possibility of things on an exaggerated and deeply personal scale.★☆★The title Thin Places reflects the ushering into my art practice of my Irish heritage and its mythologies—particularly the idea of an invisible divider, a thin place that touches time on one side and eternity on the other. I have previously explored Māori conceptualisations of this through tactile veil works that reimagine te ārai as a fluid barrier between physical and spiritual realms. This show is my way of connecting multiple whakapapa lines through shared spiritual positions. I explore the unseen and unspoken dimensions such as time-travel and intergenerational knowledge to examine how mythology-building can happen through material, as well as oral or written, transferral.
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