Through a collection of intuitive landscape paintings on heavy canvas, Dr Leonie Ngahuia Mansbridge explores her connection to whenua as intertwined with her own whakapapa.

Raised in West Auckland with her roots in the Waikato/TeKuiti area and of Ngāti Maniapoto/Pakeha descent she has created a series of works that fold and wrap us within the landscapes of their making, of their stories, and concerns. 

With a PhD titled ‘The Cross-Cultural Corridor: Performing Māori/Pakeha Identities’ Leonie has presented at numerous conferences within Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and further afield. She has participated in numerous exhibitions across Australia and has had work shown in France, China and Bangladesh, she has just completed a residency in France. This is her first major solo show of large works in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Through her works, Leonie uses landscape to connect to her Māori heritage. She says, “When I immerse myself into a landscape that I am familiar with, this sense of belonging feeds into my paintings. Māori have a saying, ‘We are the land, and the land is us’. So I am developing a visual language to engage with the landscape…what my marks hold are intangible in the physical sense, but they allude to a clear and definite system of oblique storytelling”.

available works