JIMMY MA'IA'I

Background

Ma’ia’i is based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, where he lives in Avondale, a long-standing centre for Pacific communities. His dual role as artist and Pacific Collection Manager at Auckland Museum informs his attention to the social lives of objects and their histories. In 2025, Ma’ia’i took part in programming at Parehuia, the McCahon House artists’ residency in French Bay, Titirangi, which supports artists through dedicated time and studio space in the former environment of Colin McCahon.

Works and Materials

Ma’ia’i frequently repurposes modest, familiar materials—PVC downpipe, milk crates, industrial textiles and plastics—reframing them as markers of labour and everyday economies. In the glass work Beacon (2024), in the collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, he casts a glowing yellow taro based on an ornament from his grandmother’s house, elevating a staple food into a vessel of memory. The piece foregrounds the emotional charge of domestic objects for Pacific communities living away from ancestral homelands.

In projects such as Selau Pasege (Tautai, 2022), Ma’ia’i works with readymade objects and measina (treasured items) from Pacific communities to explore how value, memory, and sacredness attach to everyday things. Across these installations, food, household ornaments, and industrial materials become vehicles for thinking about work, movement, and the ties that connect people to place.

Themes

Ma’ia’i’s practice centres on Pacific diaspora, labour, and the infrastructures that shape settlement in Aotearoa. Works such as Beacon emphasise food as a link between people, land, and culture, while his use of synthetic construction materials points to the systems that support or constrain community life. His approach has informed education projects like Hastings Art Gallery’s Me in patterns, which invited young people to express identity through pattern and material in response to his work.

In broader curatorial contexts, Ma’ia’i’s practice has been shown alongside other contemporary artists addressing belonging, home, and colonial legacies, including the exhibition Spring Time is Heart-break: Contemporary Art in Aotearoa (25 November 2023 to 19 May 2024) at Christchurch Art Gallery. There, works such as Beacon appear within a wider conversation about how artists in Aotearoa reframe place, memory, and the everyday.

Exhibitions and Collections

Ma’ia’i’s work has been shown in important contemporary art spaces in Aotearoa New Zealand, including:

• Selau Pasege and 4 Hire at Dunedin’s Blue Oyster in 2024
• What thrives on these soils at Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga at Hastings Art Gallery in 2025.
• Selau Pasege was also shown at Tautai Pacific Arts Trust in Tāmaki Makaurau from 15 February to 5 April 2025.

Beacon (2024) is held in Christchurch Art Gallery’s collection and has been shown within its contemporary art displays, including in the exhibition Spring Time is Heart-break: Contemporary Art in Aotearoa (25 November 2023–19 May 2024).

Jimmy Ma'ia'i FAQs

Ocula | 2026