Peata Larkin

Artist: Peata Larkin
Title: Kotahitanga
Year installed: 2018
Medium: Pure pigments & transparent medium on mesh & flexi-face membrane on LED lightbox units
Dimensions: 18 painted panels each: 2,750mm x 1222mm
Overall dimensions: 5,500mm x 11,000mm
Location: Park Hyatt Hotel, Wynard Quarter, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland

Artist: Peata Larkin
Title: It is told and retold
Year created: 2025
Medium: Acrylic on embroidered silk
Dimensions: 120 x 120cm framed
Signed and dated: verso

A detail of Peata Larkin’s work entitled ‘It is told and retold’ IMG X Justin Park, courtesy of the artist & PAULNACHE

Artist: Peata Larkin
Title: A sign that you fought to be here
Year created: 2025
Medium: Acrylic on embroidered silk
Dimensions: cm framed
Signed and dated: verso

A sign that you fought to be here_detail

Artist: Peata Larkin
Title: You had bones here
Year created: 2025
Medium: Acrylic on embroidered silk
Dimensions: cm framed
Signed and dated: verso

You had bones here_detail

You had bones here alongside Perhaps you'll always be a beginner

Peata Larkin’s paintings operate at the junction of diverse visual and conceptual traditions. Cultural narratives from her Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, and Ngāti Tūhourangi Whakapapa are encoded in patterns that allude to digital information, binary opposites, and the gridlines of weaving.

At the heart of Larkin’s practice is the use of paint in a way that exploits its physical properties in order to illustrate the artist’s chosen concepts. In early works, paint is pushed through the apertures in painted mesh to create painterly ‘pixels’ on the surface of each work whilst her new work has drips of paint suspended on embroidered transparent silk.

Seen up close, Larkin’s works are tactile and sculptural; they emphasize the materiality of the medium she uses. As distance is placed between the viewer and the work, these individual elements come into focus as part of an overall pattern. The painting’s reading shifts from an exploration of painterly process, form, and plasticity to a matrix containing specific information to be decoded.

This shift from concrete to abstract illustrates the socio-cultural dualities that Larkin continues to explore. She draws from twentieth-century theories of abstraction in painting and at the same time uses patterns which are layered with meaning and firmly embedded within te ao Māori. Recent works have explored the way in which Western scientific traditions fit with the holistic celestial knowledge of Māori navigators.

 

Works

 

Peata Larkin pictured in front of her work process at her studio in Tamaki Makaurau, Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Photo by Justin Park

Biography

Peata Larkin was born in 1973 and lives and works in Tamaki Makaurau, Auckland, Aotearoa, New Zealand.

Peata is of Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, and Ngāti Tuhourangi descent.

A graduate of the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, she completed her Master’s degree at RMIT University, Melbourne in 2007.

In 2018 Larkin was awarded the prestigious Kaipara Wallace Arts Trust Award, which provided a three-month residency at the Altes Spital in Solothurn, Switzerland.

Her work is part of important collections internationally, including the Memphis Museum of Fine Arts in USA and throughout New Zealand.

 
 
 

Artist: Peata Larkin
Title: Hepara – Shepard
Year created: 2022
Medium: Acrylic on embroidered silk
Dimensions: 80 x 80cm framed
Signed and dated: verso

Contact the Gallery for purchasing information

 

 Acknowledgements

Text: courtesy of the © artist Peata Larkin
Photography: Justin Park, Thomas P Teutenberg

Peata Larkin is represented by PAULNACHE Gisborne and Two Rooms, Auckland, NZ.