HOURS
Thursday 11-5
Friday 11-5
Saturday 11-4

Daffodils for Taua

AJ Manaaki Hope

30/10/2025 - 22/11/2025

Opening Wednesday 29 October 5:30 pm

In Kai Tahu mīta, Taua is the kin term for grandmother – relational rather than biological, extending to any older wāhine who has held you through whānaukataka. In wider usage, taua also refers to a war party: a collective in motion, bound together in conflict. Daffodils for Taua grows from the tensions of these distinct meanings, holding nurture against mobilisation, memory against resistance.

A.J Manaaki Hope presents a new body of work that draws from Aotearoa’s pastoral canon only to turn it inside out. Landscapes drift, unmoored, towards an ancestral horizon. Metal manu punctuate the space while a soundscape of taonga pūoro, performed by musician Wear Pounamu, engulfs the viewer. 

Here, spring is not rebirth but return. The gesture of gathering daffodils for Taua hovers just beyond reach – an offering felt, not seen. 

The works hold close to whenua and whānau while addressing the ongoing weight of colonial histories in the ecological and cultural landscape. Through reduction and repair, the practice considers how memory persists in materials and how images can be re-grounded in place.

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A.J Manaaki Hope (Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe, Kāi Tahu; Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahu, Ngāti Te Ata; Pākehā, b. Ōtepoti, 1999) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Ōtaki whose work moves between painting, assemblage, and sound. Using salvaged materials, they build paint-objects that return images to what holds: a figure, a vessel, a tool, a taonga form. Sourced from family snapshots and museum archives, these anchors sit against supports with their own past lives. 

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Poster Design by Harris Wilson

Sponsored by Parrotdog beer

With support from Creative New Zealand

Upcoming: Tom Lowe