Connecting Home, Spirit and Heritage Through Painting

Janet Mazenier’s research investigates anam áite (the Irish concept of “soul-place”) through a painting-based, practice-led inquiry grounded in phenomenology, materiality, and the affective dimensions of place. She asks how contemporary painting can evoke the spirit of place and engage environmental, ancestral, and emotional resonances.

Mazenier’s inquiry is materially driven and process-based, and through the medium of cold wax she foregrounds agency of matter and reciprocal relationships. Through a complex layering and binding of wax and pigment onto canvas, she conceives the resulting artworks as durational artefacts that hold traces of ecological, ancestral, and perceptual time. Enacting painting as material transformation, Mazenier’s attentive practice of ‘worlding’ converges spirit, matter, and memory to evoke the complexity of place.

Situated between Aotearoa New Zealand and Ireland, the research positions painting as a means of articulating lived relationships to land, memory, and heritage.

The exhibition marks the completion of Mazenier’s PhD studies.