20 November 2025 – 1 March 2026
Opening Event: Thursday, November 27 • 5:30 - 7:30PM
Heidi Brickell:
Wā Dividends
Work: Wa We Can't Afford, Heidi Brickell
Image: Thomas Teutenberg via Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga Hastings Art Gallery
This installation of Wā Dividends is a fragment that carries echoes of its larger body. Heidi Brickell’s Wā We Cant Afford was originally commissioned by Sophie Davis and Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga | Hastings Art Gallery, culminating in a six-week residency in Heretaunga Hastings, where the artist has tribal affiliations via Kahungunu ancestry. While Wā We Can’t Afford was context specific in its conception, tying threads of pūrākau-traditional oral narratives to the architecture, its title acknowledged both the richness of life to be experienced and the socio-economic upheaval of our time.
Brickell’s painted works on display are from one of four large scale paintings. Once pouring down a single wall, as an aka, a vine, or an awa-ātua, a river of life medium, it is now divided into four, to fit within the walls of the Pah Homestead. Mangopare sculptures of rimurapa, native bull kelp, once suspended into cascading arrows of ups and downs, now shoot and dart around the gallery walls. They become trajectories of waka tracing the contours of the paintings, which have been severed from a whole into islands.
The koru, a primary element of toi Māori, features in the spiral forms of Brickell’s painted work and often naturally with the rimurapa itself (in the binding of the rākau, and in the fixtures). Brickell presents a reflection on the koru form, situating it in a state connected to moana, the ocean. This is in reference to Māori as ancestral ocean voyagers who faced the might of Tangaroa. The inclusion of rimurapa also references the past (traditionally used for preserving food) and our present situation of climate change; the kelp a protector against ocean warming is under threat itself, from the warming oceans. Brickell’s exhibition title comments on the related kaupapa. Wā holds the meaning of time with associations of connection. While the second word, Dividends, addresses the intertwined relationship of capitalism and climate change.
If the paintings were pods on a vine, they are now as cuttings. If they were an awa, they have been diverted into puddles.
Retitled here, Wā Dividends articulates that this is a glimpse of a larger body, while also commenting on the impacts of financialisation. There is a whakatauki, or saying, in Māori Ka mate kāinga tahi, ka ora kāinga rua, meaning, when one house (or institution) dies, another takes its place. In the reincarnation of Wā We Cant Afford, a sentiment of resilience is invoked.
Biography
Heidi Brickell (Te Hika o Pāpāuma, Ngāti Kahungunu ki Tāmaki-nui-ā-Rua, Rongomaiwahine, Rangitāne, Ngāi Tara, Ngāti Apakura, Airihi, Kōtimana, Ingarangi, Tiamana) is based in Ōtaki with a background in Kura Kaupapa Māori education and te reo Māori revitalisation.
Her work has recently featured in major surveys of national contemporary art in public galleries and is regularly exhibited at Laree Payne Gallery. From 2022-23, her solo exhibition PAKANGA FOR THE LOSTGIRL toured from Te Wai Ngutu Kākā Gallery in Tāmaki Mākaurau Auckland to Ōtautahi Christchurch and Pōneke Wellington.