Israel Tangaroa Birch is a significant and unique presence in New Zealand art and contemporary painting practice. He paints with ever-changing light and the consequent experience the viewer has becomes a mix of part-dream and part-fact, part-now and what came before.

This instantaneous slippage of time and place, between what is seen, what is sensed and what is supposed, arises in a transcendent and beguiling manner.  It’s as if a new, secretive life force has somehow been exposed, where everything is animated by metamorphosing light and in that process something hidden and previously denied – an innate spirit world - has become revealed.

Birch contemplates our immediate worlds, using the metaphor of water – often as if we are witnessing tides moving, if not colliding. Each work has an explicit narrative focus encapsulated in its title. In this manner, Birch adroitly moves between direct commentary (as Māori) on current political and social circumstances and concerns and the symbolic languages of pattern. These are paintings that elicit perception of the Māori spiritual worlds while dreaming of healthier Tangata Whenua and Tangata Tiriti partnership than is evidenced in the divisive politics at this time. This is not to suggest he doesn’t yell ‘enough is enough’ – such as in Never.

Furthermore, Birch uses incantation, the language of pattern, the architecture of words, the rippling rhythm of carving marks. Under his technical expertise no colour is only what it at first seems either. Using multiple layers of lacquer and pigment dyes onto stainless steel, we come to see the apparently dominant colour in each work undergoing significant alterations in tone, substance and presence.

He harnesses light in an inconstant and unfixed manner, its intensities varying as it splinters and its incidence slips and slides. This side-by-side fluxing absence and presence of light is a key visual device that morphs and changes back and forth. From one instant to the next, the holographic-like image appears to recompose and restructure itself, surprising with the ineffable effect of appearing either behind, in front of or outside the painting surface itself. Spatial depth exists by being alluded to and at the same time compromised by being contradicted: nothing is as it first seems in these irrepressible and unforgettable works. Nothing is ever fixed or finite, except the overall titled messages.

This extended whānau/family of works encapsulates the many current streams of his commanding practice. United and liberated by light, we are taken on a journey by Israel Birch, where small steps taken over time can equate to vast change. Ahakoa he iti, he pounamu / although it is small, it is precious.