Janet Mazenier’s practice 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 seeks to foreground the agency of matter in her work. Through a complex layering and binding of wax and pigment onto the 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.