Reflections on an adopted country.

The first European artists in New Zealand were visitors. Initially they documented the flora, fauna and peoples of Aotearoa. Later, landscape paintings were used to promote colonisation, primarily these artists were also visitors or immigrants to the country. I too am an immigrant and as with those earlier visitors my vision of the land is overlaid with my memories of another land, my homeland.

This series of work builds on Horizon, painted in Thames, 2009. Horizon uses the empty landscape of the tidal flat of the Firth of Thames at the southern end of the Hauraki Gulf. Letters Home reflects a fresh landscape in my life, that of the Port Hills south of Christchurch. My husband and I moved here toward the end of 2009 and that first summer we lived nearby and I have spent hours walking the grassy hills. Here sheep populate the landscape.

In this work I recall the parable of the lost sheep, a single sheep who has strayed from the shelter of the fold. It is a universal story of home and displacement. Of a life framed within the experience of another culture. In a world where boundaries are shifting and dissolving, life as an immigrant can oscillate between novel experiences and the alienation and loneliness of exile in a strange land. Sometimes we must be lost in order to find each other.

Sheep were domesticated by humankind around 10000 years ago and feature strongly in our myths and symbology. There is no doubt too of the central place sheep hold in New Zealand Pakeha economic and cultural history. Sheep represent a link for me to my own homeland, where they feature less strongly in Polish history but are a persistent aspect of the pastoral landscape.