7.3

THIN PLACES

Jade Townsend
Jade Townsend
20.03.25–19.04.25
Season is proud to present Thin Places by Jade Townsend (Ngāti Kahungunu, Te Āti Haunui-a-Pāpārangi).
The exhibition comprises paintings and large-scale sculptures that are connected through an evolving narrative of dual consciousness. Archetypal entities from a range of cultural and spiritual contexts—including rosary beads, a silver spoon, koru, and whetū—have been brought together to be read in different ways. There is a sense of a treasure box, a gathering of keepsakes, a deck of tarot cards. The show creates a space for the exploration of futurisms and transcendence.

JADE TOWNSEND
Awarua (two rivers), 2025
Polished stainless steel
Dimensions variable
JADE TOWNSEND
Leaving home is never easy, 2024
Acrylic on linen in custom Australian sycamore frame by Chris Connolly/MacBlack Timber, Whanganui
350 x 250mm (work); 375 x 275mm (frame)

N.B. The tree for the frame was felled near Jade’s nana’s house.
JADE TOWNSEND
On our own time, 2024
Acrylic on linen in custom Australian sycamore frame by Chris Connolly/MacBlack Timber, Whanganui
700 x 600mm (work); 730 x 630mm (frame)

N.B. The tree for the frame was felled near Jade’s nana’s house.
JADE TOWNSEND
A loving echo, 2024
Acrylic on linen in custom Australian sycamore frame by Chris Connolly/MacBlack Timber, Whanganui
350 x 250mm (work); 375 x 275mm (frame)

N.B. The tree for the frame was felled near Jade’s nana’s house.
Artist statement
‘All prickly with crosses, all covered with inscriptions, all spaded up and shaken by countless daily burials, we are charged with the transmutation, the resurrection, the transfiguration of all things. For how can we save what is visible if not by using the language of absence, of the invisible?’—Rainer Maria Rilke
The title Thin Places reflects the ushering into my art practice of my Irish heritage and its my-thologies—particularly the idea of an invisible divider, a thin place that touches time on one side and eternity on the other. I have previously explored Māori conceptualisations of this through tactile veil works that reimagine te ārai as a fluid barrier between physical and spiritual realms. This show is my way of connecting multiple whakapapa lines through shared spiritual positions. I explore the unseen and unspoken dimensions such as time-travel and intergener-ational knowledge to examine how mythology-building can happen through material, as well as oral or written, transferral.★☆★In my teenage bedroom, at my great-grandfather Paul’s house in Liverpool, there was a small ‘memory box’, a repurposed rosary bead box containing broken treasures that had belonged to his wife, my Irish great-grandmother, Anne Murphy. Her life and subsequent death were wrapped in mystery. There was a knowledge withholding—or ‘kaiponu’, to use a Whanganui expression—around her story. The only clues I had of the woman whose ‘eyes were my eyes’ were fragments of shiny adornments and waxy pictures of unnamed yet familiar figures. I would frequently review the bitsy, sacred mess, wondering if the items were indeed precious to Anne or made precious through her absence from them.
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JADE TOWNSEND
Alloy, 2024
Polished stainless steel, stripper’s pole, rock, resin
2220 x 510 x 120mm
JADE TOWNSEND
Mauri tau, 2025
Acrylic on linen in hand-carved sapele frame by Emile Drescher, Tāmaki Makaurau
920 x 810mm (work); 965 x 855mm (frame)
JADE TOWNSEND
Unfurling, 2024
Acrylic on linen in custom Australian sycamore frame by Chris Connolly/MacBlack Timber, Whanganui
550 x 400mm (work); 575 x 425mm (frame)

N.B. The tree for the frame was felled near Jade’s nana’s house.
JADE TOWNSEND
Mauri ora, 2025
Acrylic on linen in hand-carved sapele frame by Emile Drescher, Tāmaki Makaurau
1000 x 850mm (work); 1045 x 895mm (frame)
JADE TOWNSEND
She turned her own body into an anatomy of love, 2024
Acrylic on linen in custom Australian sycamore frame by Chris Connolly/MacBlack Timber, Whanganui
650 x 500mm (work); 675 x 525mm (frame)

N.B. The tree for the frame was felled near Jade’s nana’s house.