Ayesha Green

Ngāti Kahungungu, Kai Tahu

Ayesha lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau

Her research-based painting practice attempts to relocate and redefine the power relationships of, and within, Māori representation. In 2019, her work “Nana’s Birthday (A Big Breath)” was the overall winner of the National Contemporary Arts Award at Waikato Museum. Ayesha used the Mana Whenua project as an opportunity to gently introduce earth pigments into her painting practice, gathering kōkōwai from her Kai Tahu whenua for the first time. This introduction built into a body of work called Dear Ayesha, love from Joseph (2020) which was a series of postcards written kōkōwai on stone paper. 

“In her studio-based practice, Ayesha Green sustains a provocative engagement with processes of reproduction. By her own admission, Green utilises mimicry and copying to undermine the authority of symbolic objects, questioning the authenticity of their claims to power. While giving precedence to source material from the era of first contact between Māori and Pakēha, Green continues to draw on a wide range of references. Attempting to transmute the power of inherited objects and images by establishing new reading’s, Green thus pushes back at European-centric practices of anthropology and classification, and the demonstrable military and cultural domination of our shared colonial history.”

Elle Loui August, Matters Art Journal Aotearoa: Issue 8 (2018)

All images below are from Ayesha’s exhibition Good Citizen which was at Jhana Millers Gallery, Wellington, May-June 2021