From shadelands to shade lands : painting as a place inquiry, how can painting, as a situated research practice, trace the shadows, absences, and unease within Pākehā ways of seeing? : submitted in partial fulfilment of a Master of Fine Arts, Massey University

Abstract

My project From Shadelands to Shade Lands: Painting as a Place Inquiry investigates how painting, as a research-led practice, can question and reframe inherited Pākehā ways of seeing land in Aotearoa. The project begins from the recognition that these visual habits have often treated whenua as property, resource, or scenery—modes of looking that supported colonial occupation and continue to shape how many Pākehā understand place. In response, the research engages with relational understandings of mana whenua, grounded in their whakapapa, reciprocity, and ongoing connection. Painting emerges as the primary site through which these different ways of seeing are brought into relation, overlap, and which sometimes unsettle one another. The work is anchored in a specific place: my family’s holiday home at Lake Rotoiti near Okere Falls. Four generations of my maternal family have lived with this place in shifting ways, forming an archive of memory, affection, silence, and uncertainty. Treating this site as a case study allows me to examine how belonging and dislocation are inherited, and how Pākehā ways of seeing influence what is noticed, retold, or forgotten. Through a sustained ecology of research, looking, memory, and material process, my painting functions as both method and inquiry. The works engage with the shadows, gaps, and hesitations that shape my family’s relationship to Rotoiti. The paintings do not aim to resolve these tensions; instead, they make them visible—showing where attachment, habit, unease, and colonial inheritance intersect. Overall, the project argues that painting can contribute to remaking Pākehā relationships with place by slowing familiar modes of looking and opening space for reflection, responsibility, and developing more grounded forms of connection to whenua no longer held in Māori land title.