Vespertine

Rosie McBride, Emma Beth Richards, Rita Takeuchi, Anneke Westra

9.04.26 - 2.05.26

‘Vespertine’ is defined as ‘of, relating to, or occurring in the evening’. At night, swamps transform - becoming dark, wet spaces that are fertile with potential. Where Björk’s 2001 album Vespertine explores this concept sonically, this show takes its resonance and turns it into something physical.

Rosie McBride, Emma Beth Richards, Rita Takeuchi and Anneke Westra’s work comes together as lights, beckoning the water table to rise in the stark white room of the gallery, our reimagined swamp. Vespertine is a celebration of the swamp beneath our feet. Utilising traditional and unconventional painting methods in tandem, these artists build a portal to the world that painting enables - a watery world of noticing, dancing and rewilding.

They gather in a circle on the streets of Wellington, and hold their ears to the concrete of empty roads to hear the streams still flowing.

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Rosie McBride (Scottish, English, Irish, Pākehā, Tangata Tiriti) sees themselves as a painter, however, she enjoys pushing the boundaries of what makes an artwork a painting. They grew up in Te Anau, a small town in Murihiku. Working with found natural materials alongside oil paints to engage with the surrounding whenua of where they are now and where they were brought up. Rosie finds earth connection through understanding more about the whenua that they reside on.

Emma Beth Richards (b. 2001) is a Tāmaki Makaurau-based artist who received a Master of Visual Arts (2025) from Auckland University of Technology. Richards’ practice centres on figurative painting, exploring representations of women’s bodies through feminist and posthumanist frameworks. Engaging closely with the materiality of paint, Richards’ work suggests a transcorporeal relationship between female-leaning bodies and swamp-like environments, one that is fluid and continually shifting.

Rita Takeuchi is a painter and multi-media artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau, holding a Bachelor and Master of Visual Arts from Auckland University of Technology (AUT). Her practice is grounded in the everyday encounters, treating their mundanity as a site through which to explore their layered, palpable nature. Working primarily through painting, alongside wood carving and sound installation, the everyday is reflected as a space where time becomes soft and malleable, slipping beyond its habitual rigidity.

Anneke Westra is a visual artist and writer based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara currently working out of Meanwhile. Her interests lie in intangible watery phenomena and the architectural shape of memory, and she is curious about how to entangle her practice with ecological realities and eco-feminist thought. She primarily works with oil and charcoal, and enjoys playing with binaries of translucency and redactive negative spaces to ephemeral, atmospheric effect.

Poster design by Harris Wilson

Current Exhibition