Jana Wood

The New Zealand Steel Gallery, Franklin Arts Centre, 12 Massey Avenue, Pukekohe, Auckland.

ONEPŪ – shifting sands / shifting time presented by six members of the mothermother collective is a group exhibition that responds to our ecological moment. It’s a show that looks to the past for guidance, and speaks to our shared futures. This experimental, site-responsive exhibition engages with the urgent subject of climate change by a range of intimate and local ecological art-practices from Margaret Feeney, Inga Fillary, Michelle Mayn, Melanie Ross, Nat Tozer and Jana Wood.

This show is the culmination of several months of process, practice and wānanga at Te Puaha o’Waikato Port Waikato from October 2024 – Februrary 2025. The artists have engaged in various ways to observe the how the ecologies exist; as a rapidly shifting landscape, as a home, as a site of enquiry for learning. Acknowledgements to the local residents of Te Puaha o’Waikato for your guidance and permission. We’re delighted to share some of our observations, responses and reflections.

Left to right, Korowai, Blue Zone and Whenua. 1000x1000mm, Natural and Synthetic pigments, marble dust iron-sand on board.

Nina Dyer wrote…

A resident of Port Waikato, painter Jana Wood left Tamaki Makaurau to reside in a place where the atmosphere can be felt more intensely; negative ions course over the dunes, transporting the rhythms of sand, water and air inland. For her series of paintings developed out of the wãnanga, Wood shifted her gaze from the qualities of the Port’s light and air – elements foregrounded in her recent practice – towards what lay beneath: “looking down rather than out … the energy is more a slumping, a gravity, and there is a downward flow and heaviness to the works”. The paintings are an ode to the drama and monumentality of the shifting dune systems, concentrated images which capture a feeling of being subsumed within something greater, something uncontrollable. By working through highly laboured techniques – layers of gesso and egg tempera made from scratch, mixed with natural pigment – Wood approached the paintings as events, parts of a life cycle, relinquishing the desire to capture or make still natural phenomena”.

See Nina Dyer’s full essay https://www.mothermother.co.nz/iterations/onepu

Dina Jezdić wrote…

Colour moves through the space like a tide, steady and unforced. In Jana Wood’s paintings, vivid gestures meet the rhythm of the coast. Joy emerges, not as a denial of sorrow, but held gently within it. Her brushstrokes carry the motion of estuarine waters, shifting and restless, refusing to be fixed. They do not explain. They evoke. Like salt left on the skin after swimming, they remain as a trace of intimacy, a quiet reminder of what was once submerged.

See Dina Jezdić’s full review in the Spring 2025 edition of Art New Zealand, Pages 44-45

Korowai, 1000x1000mm, earth pigments, synthetic pigments calcium carbonate, iron-sand on board

Blue Zone, 1000x1000mm, earth pigments, synthetic pigments, calcium carbonate, iron-sand on board

Whenua 1000x1000mm, earth pigments, synthetic pigments, calcium carbonate, iron-sand on board (sold)

View from the top of the Dunes (4), Synthetic pigment, calcium carbonate, iron-sand on board

View from the top of the Dunes (3), earth pigments, synthetic pigments, calcium carbonate, iron-sand on board

Opening speech at ONEPŪ , participating artists from left to right Inga Fillary, Margaret Feeney, Melanie Arnold, Michelle Mayn, Natalie Tozer, Jana Wood (and visitor Tatum Vaughan Rodger on right)