Pangaea meaning ‘all the earth’ in early geological time was a supercontinent incorporating almost all of the landmasses of the world. Natchez Hudson’s extended series of that name (recently exhibited at the Suter Art Gallery, Nelson) is a startling combination of deftly delivered photo-realist alpine landscapes directly contrasted by innovative material insertions and the counterpoint conversations of abstract minimalism.

Andy Leleisi’uao, just announced as recipient of the Senior Pacific Artist Award for 2022, delivers endless visual parables. Part-game, part-story of human endeavour, Leleisi’uao’s plural language crosses boundaries of time, cultures and event. Playing with scale and perspective, Leleisi’uao demonstrates a unique preparedness to recompose and divide pictorial space into compartments and sequences of windows and panoramas, inside which no object or body shape is ever as first seemed, no narrative completely fixed or final.

Jenna Packer also crosses back and forth in time, using the past as a metaphor of engagement as she comments on our times.  Neil Adcock uses the palette of internal occlusions revealed in slices of pounamu, the language of suggestion and the multi-faceted tradition of the tiki to deliver sculptures riven with personality and cultural significance. Phil Brooks places the architecture of form at the very centre of stoneware that simultaneously explores notions of open and closed, inside and out. Evidencing a degree of restraint noticeably rare and an unmistakeable visual character, Brooks is clearly established as a major new figure in New Zealand ceramics.

Galia Amsel harnesses light to reveal transitioning shape and the unique internal space present only in glass. Her works elicit profound sensations of seasons, weather, wind and movement. The skin-like surfaces – variously acid etched and sand-blasted – trap light and/or allow it to pass. In this way, her works build internal atmospheres while undergoing ceaseless alteration, change and expression.

Dick Frizzell celebrates the familiar, finding his very distinctive rhythmic visual language in the apparently ordinary. Exhibiting a rare mastery of the particular indices of each location and every place, Frizzell’s rendering authority and varied use of light elevates his subject to the iconic.