Star Gossage is a Māori contemporary artist of Ngāti Wai and Ngāti Ruanui descent. Gossage's expressive, raw, richly textured paintings carry an emotional intensity through which she explores memories, feelings, and relationships between people and the landscape.
Read MoreBorn in Otorohanga, Aotearoa/ New Zealand, Star Gossage's artistic identity is deeply rooted in her Maori Ngāti Wai and Ngāti Ruanui ancestry, and the Ratana religion she was born into. Her French, Portuguese, and English ancestry also plays a role, defining what Lisa Reihana has called her 'Transoceanic identity.'
Gossage studied film and drama at Otago Polytechnic in Dunedin, graduating with a Diploma of Fine Arts in 1995. Initially pursuing an acting career, in 2002 she shifted her focus to painting. The artist cites Australian painters Arthur Boyd and Sydney Nolan as early artistic influences. A massive influence on Gossage's main body of works, however, has been the coastal landscape of Pakiri, north of Auckland, where she currently lives and works on ancestral land overlooking Hauturu.
The landscape that inspires Star Gossage's main body of work is not simply a setting but a subject. The influence of her surrounding ancestral homelands can be traced visually in the dark, melancholic, earthy tones of her paintings. Gossage mixes in locally sourced ochre, clay, tar, lime, and found wood with her oil paints to capture the DNA and raw texture of the landscape.
With Hauturu being the site of the forceful eviction of the artist's ancestors by colonial authorities, the land is laden with personal and historical significance, conveyed through the melancholic tone of her paintings. From a Māori world view, Gossage draws upon the inseparable connections of wairua, whenua, whakapapa, and whanau (spirit, land, ancestry, and family), in her works.
Often Star Gossage's paintings present dream-like, ethereal tupuna (ancestor) figures in varying levels of detail, from up-close portraits to a shimmering light in a landscape. Situated within turbid, shifting landscapes, these timeless female figures are caught in unblinking moments of prayer-like reflection. Through them the artist conveys a diverse array of themes relating to death, grief, compassion, healing, unity, and love.
Supplanting the premeditated approach to painting, Gossage does not begin a painting knowing whether it will become a portrait, a landscape, or a still life. These things become known during the process through subconscious gestures and the resultant layout of pigment. Sometimes the artist will work with her bare hands to create a textured image with delicately imprecise, thin layers of colour suggesting a passing moment.
Beyond her central passion of painting, Star Gossage's artistic expression extends to performance, film, theatre, poetry, writing, and acting. In the seven-minute experimental video work DUST (1995), Gossage performed a memorial to her maternal grandmother. Evoking fading memories, the video was overexposed and grainy, featuring textural shots of things like a floral carpet and a crocheted dress, cut with film of a lone female figure with fern fronds, moving closer along a metal road.
Star Gossage's art has been exhibited widely in group and solo shows across New Zealand and Australia. Her work also features in key New Zealand institutional collections, including Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki; Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington; and the Wallace Arts Trust, Auckland.
He Tangata The People, New Zealand Portrait Gallery, Wellington (2020); Float Through the Sky, Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland (2018); Star Gossage, Whakatāne Museum and Research Centre (2017); Piki Te Ora, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne (2017); PAH, Wallace Arts Trust Centre, Pah Homestead, Auckland (2015); Ora, Oedipus Rex Gallery, Auckland (2001); Nga Pungawaihanga, Milford Galleries Dunedin (1996).
This is Tomorrow, Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland (2020); Still No Answer, The Vivian, Matakana (2019); Ko Taku Whare, To Whare Hoki, The Vivian, Matakana (2016); Mana Moana: HNL/AKL, Nā Mea Hawai'i, Honolulu (2016); Five Maori Painters, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki (2014); Oceania, City Gallery Wellington (2011); Cultural Safety, The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt (1996).
Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2021
