Every painting Jade Townsend has made since her son was born has him somewhere in it, as a shell, a feather, a bird, the reflection of the moon.
Hung on the wall, propped along the bookshelf, leaning against the backs of chairs, paintings consume the dining room, inky blues bleeding into lilac.
Up close the detail arrives, ink laid across the linen with the finest brushes belonging to Jade Townsend (Ngāti Kahungunu, Te Āti Haunui-a-Pāpārangi). Closer again and her son Hayes-Ānaru appears among the fields of colour. He’s been in every painting his mother has made since he was born, as a shell, a feather, a bird, the reflection of the moon.
Jade tells people her studio is in the kitchen and dining room of the Takapuna home she shares with her husband Adam Ladley and their two boys, Hayes-Ānaru and his younger brother Avery. “Actually,” she says, “the kitchen and dining room are in my studio.”
The order matters. She paints Mondays and Tuesdays, in school hours. If she isn’t cooking she’s painting, and when dinner arrives the work gets pushed to one side of the table and pushed back afterwards. Dwelling on a completed piece is part of making it. “I don’t force myself to be productive in the times that are allocated for painting,” she says. “I allow myself to sit and just look.”
Works for Roots and Wings, an upcoming show (and her first to be held in Australia), are finished, but still private for now. Framing comes next, then Nasha Gallery in Sydney. Until then they will stay where they are. These paintings are darker than what’s come before, veil upon veil of purple and blue, each layer knocked back until the picture underneath it has gone. “They feel sacrificial,” says Jade.
Motherhood is the subject. These are divinely feminine works, and the room they were made in became, as Jade describes it, a womb space. They come out of where her Māori, Pākehā and British heritage meet. Each is an annual of Hayes-Ānaru’s life, and now Avery’s. “Capturing his reclamation and revitalisation journey, too,” says Jade of Hayes-Ānaru. “Him learning his reo, and stepping into spaces that are scary and new, and just the absolute elegance by which he does that.”
Everything Jade makes runs back to te ārai/the veil, and to threshold and portal spaces, the in-between. She has followed the same idea through textiles, sound and sculpture. Painting is the commitment now. No sketches, no studies: she starts with a quality, an atmosphere, sometimes a person the work is for, and the story finds its way in.
Whanganui, where she grew up, is a town she’s proud to be from. “I had an incredible childhood there. Galleries and lots of artists, lots of my family and a great group of friends,” says Jade.
A move to England with her mother in her teens set her on another path, and she didn’t quite find her place at school in Liverpool. Drawing and painting became her refuge, first in the art room at lunchtimes, where what she’d left behind started coming up through the work, then on a painting degree at Manchester Metropolitan University. “I’ve been homesick my whole life,” says Jade. “I’m still homesick.”
Going back for the Tylee Cottage residency closed a loop: as a child she and her parents would walk past that cottage wondering who was staying there. Her whānau rallied to make it happen: Adam with both boys, her mum flying from England, and Francis McWhannell, her co-director at Season gallery, holding that space. Afterwards, her show From the Lion’s Mouth carried her father’s sign-writing calligraphy into the paintings. She meant them as a big love letter, for anyone whose only sense of Whanganui might be the paintings. “If something terrible happened and I could never paint again, I’d be okay with that,” says Jade. “It completed something for me.”
For four years she’s run Season, the gallery she and Francis talked into being over Zoom. The gallery is in Grey Lynn now, a minute from
Te Awahou school which her boys attend. Hayes-Ānaru’s class took over for a one-day Matariki show, hung their own work, served the kai and gave each other feedback.
Among the roster of exhibitions, there’s been a weaving wānanga with Purewa Hodge, book launches and birthday parties. Season also represents Robyn Kahukiwa. To the boys she’s a household name. “I didn’t connect her work with her name until I was in my twenties,” says Jade. The reclamation she watches in her son is her own as well. Jeweller Neke Moa, who was in the gallery’s first show and is an informal mentor to Jade, stays with the family when she’s in town, which makes her one of the aunties, too. The level of kōrero lifts when Neke is in the room. “When you’re around her, you realise what’s tika [true] and what’s pono [genuine],” says Jade. Neke showed the pair what a gallery could be, which was less a spectacle than a magnet.
What all of this has done to Jade’s own practice is make it feel smaller, which she means as a compliment. “My life is drenched in beauty,” she says. Sitting with the work they show has given her something to answer to, and a sense of her own job as custodial. There’s something else to unlock in herself, she says, and more to say in painting, particularly in this country.
Asked what she’s hopeful for, Jade talks about holding onto the unconventional way they live, making sure curiosity isn’t squeezed out. She can’t make sense of the world her sons are inheriting, and is sure they’ll need creativity to solve it, which makes a kitchen table with paintings drying on it a reasonable classroom.
seasonaotearoa.com
Hear more from Jade in her episode of Inside Stories with Alice Lines, out now.
Interview Alice Lines
Photography Simon Wilson
The post Artist Jade Townsend paints at the kitchen table, for her sons appeared first on Homestyle.
