George Watson, Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta, and Not a solitary feeling

Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery’s Hōtoke Winter season includes three exhibitions: solo projects ‘Ua Tafa Mai Ata: Matāli’i ki Wainuiātea by Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta and The Choice by George Watson, and a group show, Not a solitary feeling.  

George Watson’s installation brings together a series of seemingly divergent refrences: to the farm, the villa, and the 19th-century English novel. Recurring themes in the artist’s practice, here they are positioned within a narrative about settler colonial inheritances, and the ways that such histories haunt us in the present. Using architectural staples of rural and domestic life in Aotearoa—galvanised steel gates and the wooden fretwork often found on the front porches of villas—the work articulates a pared back language of containment and restraint, gentrification and nostalgia, and the performance of order.

Pairs of steel gates branded “bullmaster” and “deermaster” are mounted high across the gallery walls, latched and yet holding nothing at bay. Behind two of them, sections of the wall have been removed in an unseemly reveal of the building itself. The sole image in the space is a reproduction of pages from Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, held for three generations in the artist’s family. Watson has frequently cited colonial literature in her work, recognising the the novel as a form of “script” within the colonial project. Here the pages are marked with the artist’s father’s inky fingerprints. Recalling the fingerprinting of a crime scene, or simply someone whose job leaves them with dirty hands, these marks subtly allude to the class hierarchies encoded within the novel.  

Watson is of Ngāti Porou and Ngāti Mutunga whakapapa, and Moriori hokopapa. Recent exhibitions include Apologia, Robert Heald Gallery, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington (2025); The Farm, Coastal Signs, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland (2025); and Hau Whakatonu, Govett-Brewster, Ngāmotu New Plymouth (2023). The Choice is curated by Abby Cunnane and Keani Rewha.

In ‘Ua Tafa Mai Ata: Matāli’i ki Wainuiātea, architect and artist Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta builds an ātea (most commonly referring to the open area in front of a Māori meeting house, where visitors are welcomed and issues are debated). The low platform is made from bricks salvaged from Wellington’s Te Ngākau Civic Square, the entry orienting us toward the north-east horizon where the constellation Matariki/Matāli’i rises. Overhead, loose folds of translucent fabric reference the layered heavens of cosmologies across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa (the Pacific Ocean). The installation opens and closes each day with karanga recorded by Rhonda Tibble, and includes a soundscape by Salvador Brown. The work grew from Heta’s interest in narratives surrounding the atua (deity) Wainuiātea, associated with the ocean and the primordial sea that pre-existed the physical world as we know it. This is the installation's third presentation; it was originally titled The Body of Wainuiātea, within Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania, curated by Taloi Havini for Ocean Space, Venice in 2024, and shown at Artspace Sydney in 2025. Heta is of Ngātiwai, Ngāpuhi, Waikato Tainui, Sāmoan, and Tokelauan descent. Recent major projects include her collaboration with photographer John Miller, Pouwātū: Active Presence for the 22nd Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN (2020). Heta is a principal at architecture firm Jasmax and co-founder of the Māori design collective Waka Māia. The exhibition is curated by Israel Randell.

Not a solitary feeling addresses Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington’s art collection through an environmental lens. Comprising loaned and collection works by Fiona Connor, Colin McCahon, Ross Hemera, Brett Graham, Mark Harvey, Ayesha Green, Yuki Kihara, Kate Newby, Layla Rudneva-Mackay, Christine Hellyar, Tanya Ashken, and Melissa Macleod, Not a solitary feeling turns our attention toward the wind, the water, and the air itself, proposing the atmosphere as something held in common. The exhibition is the third chapter in a collaboration between Susan Ballard, Professor of Art History and Environmental Humanities at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, and Sophie Thorn, former Kaiwhakarākei Curator Collections at the gallery, following Listening Stones Jumping Rocks (2021) and Folded Memory (2023).