Peata Larkin (Te Arawa, Tūhourangi, Ngāti Whakaue and Ngāti Tūwharetoa) and Miranda Joseph use paint as both material and image to explore multiple ways of seeing and experiencing nature, time, place and ourselves.

Larkin builds layers of paint onto woven silk panels, creating a distinctive visual language drawn from traditional tukutuku and the patterning of star constellations. These paintings follow the lunar months and seasonal cycles of te maramataka, the Māori lunar calendar, with Pipiri (June) celebrating the beginning of the New Year and the rising of Matariki. Together, the panels hold time as cyclical rather than linear, and nature becomes a metaphor for a continuity in which past and present coexist, allowing identity and belonging to be understood through whakapapa and connections that extend across generations.

For Joseph, cherry blossom (sakura) provides a way of reading time as both cyclical and fleeting, where emergence, flowering and disappearance are experienced through the shifting perception of blossoms across layers of paint, light and surface. In Spring Blossom, golden veins merge from clusters of pearlescent petal forms, perhaps branches bathed in light or the sky at dusk, seen through blooming canopies. Hundreds of translucent paint petals create a surface of undulating relief in Pink Frost Blossom, where shifting light reveals hidden layers of colour and different experiences of viewing.

Extending the liminal, Larkin and Joseph create a space in which the physical and conceptual are inseparable, where linear and binary ideologies collapse and experience becomes fluid and multiple. Painting and sculpture, surface and ground, delicate and demanding in their physical presence, the works operate simultaneously as image and object, speaking to both the natural and spiritual, the material and immaterial. In this multiplicity, the works become a way of thinking about how our sense of identity, place and belonging is formed through how we perceive and experience the world.