Maraea Timutimu:

He kāwai whenua He kāwai whakapapa

Maraea Timutimu is a contemporary Maori artist from New Zealand, who has gained recognition for her work across various mediums, including painting, sculpture, and installation art. She was born in 1971 in Hastings, New Zealand, and grew up in the Hawke's Bay region. Her art reflects her Maori heritage and culture. She often uses traditional Maori motifs and symbols in her work. She has also explored the themes of identity, connection to the land, and the intersection between traditional and contemporary Maori culture.

The following information about Maraea Timutimu’s exhibition was provided by the Tauranga Art Gallery.

He kāwai whenua He kāwai whakapapa addresses the centrality of whenua within mātauranga Māori and the ways it can connect us to our stories, histories, identities and whakapapa. Maraea presents a suite of large-scale colour photographs that are a play on portraiture; stones and rocks are collected from the waterways of her maternal and paternal kāinga at Matapihi, Tauranga Moana, and Rūātoki, Eastern Bay of Plenty. They are composed into totemic forms that poetically stand in for people and places that are important to the artist. These photographic portraits provide a unique insight into the connectedness of whenua and whakapapa through a Māori lens. “When we view whenua in its natural state, we see that it is made up of layers. These layers all have a whakapapa, derived from the natural pigments of Papatūānuku (mother earth) connecting it to place and time. It depicts us and the makeup of our individual genealogy” says Timutimu.