Reciting Allegories

Elam School of Fine Arts

29 November - Sunday 30 November 2025

This series of paintings recontextualises fables and oral traditions from a contemporary perspective. I draw inspiration from Aesop's Fables, Fairy Tales, Nursery Tales, Oral Traditions and similar stories. I explore how they have been depicted and retold, with stories such as Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, The Fox and the Rabbit, and similar tales. Through research, I identified recurring tropes that appear across these stories, focusing on how they are depicted as animals and environments to convey deeper meanings. I transformed these tropes into painting, translating their meanings into my own work. Through the process of painting, I worked with dyes and oil pastels, allowing the inherent entropy of the dyes to influence the outcome while contrasting the structure provided by the oil pastels. The dye bleeds into my canvas, shaping my tropes while the oil pastels define them. This practice embodies my illustrative, loose, and unfinished style of painting, reflecting the indeterminacy of oral traditions and allowing viewers to assign their own meaning. My canvases come in the form of bedsheets I have gathered, imitating the act of gathering stories. I explore materiality through painting onto the bedsheets to connect conceptually to the moment when these stories are told. I dive deeper into the relationship between bedsheets and the dreaming state we associate with stories. My intention in these artworks is to establish and build on the whakapapa of the stories I pull inspiration from, by engaging with the concepts embedded within these stories from a historical perspective. I want the viewer to engage with the art through their own interpretations, establishing their own meaning from the art to build upon the existing ideas.

Stork (2025), 2610 x 1850, Dye and Oil Pastels

Serpent (2025), 2480 x 2600, Dye and Oil Pastels

Wolf (2025), 2270 x 2600, Dye and Oil Pastels

Forest (2025), 2750 x 2400, Dye and Oil Pastels

Cat (2025), 2460 x 2100, Dye and Oil Pastels

Rat (2025), 2550 x 1700, Dye and Oil Pastels

Rabbit (2025), 2480 x 1900, Dye and Oil Pastels

Fox (2025), 2460 x 1200, Dye and Oil Pastels