Ko au te Whenua (2025)

Rose, Dogwood, Tumeric, Cochineal, Black Doris Plum, Indigo, Calendula, Lavender, Cornflower, Madder Root, Hollyhock, Ink, Silk

990 x 1350mm

Light Falls - Artist Extract

As a multi-disciplinary artist, Ana Krakosky explores the physical and spiritual qualities of materials, grounding her practice in a deep connection to whenua (land).

A descendant of Te Ātiawa, Ana was born and raised in Whakatū (Nelson) and now lives on the West Coast with her family, where she runs a thriving practice as a carver and jeweller. Her work is exhibited and sold in galleries across Aotearoa. Ana also spends time in Christchurch, where she is completing her BFA in Painting at Ilam School of Fine Arts.

Working with pounamu has profoundly shaped Ana’s artistic direction. Its spiritual, cultural, and physical qualities continue to inspire her inquiry into materiality, perception, and our relationship with the natural world around us. Her exploration of the local environment has led her discover and experiment with extracting colour from natural materials such as roots, seed husks, leaves, petals, rust and bark.

Ever curious, she works across a range of mediums and surfaces. In her debut exhibition, Light Falls, both the artist and the work engage in an exploration of the embodied experience of being, how we sense, perceive, live and move within light and space.

From the opaque to the transparent, the reflected and the absorbed, light becomes the thread connecting each piece. It filters through exquisitely dyed silk, perspex, and delicately formed lacework; bounces off and skitters across polished marble and copper; and settles into the warm grains of timber and the ridges of rich oils. With subjects that move between soft portraiture, figuration, and traces of everyday life, the significance of light is addressed for more than just its physical properties, as an equally important spiritual and emotional aspect of our existence.

Both the outcome of a meditative process and an invitation to meditation itself, the works do not command light, they invite it to become both subject and collaborator. In giving form to something as intangible as light, Light Falls reveals how perception is mutable, shaped by what is seen, what is felt, and what lingers just beyond reach.