Paul Martinson - Transition: Online Catalogue

Opening Wednesday April 1st - 5.30-6.30pm

Sanderson are pleased to present the exhibition Transition by Aotearoa New Zealand environmental painter Paul Martinson.

Transition is a thought-provoking exhibition that pairs science-informed imagery with a lifetime spent observing Aotearoa’s natural world. Through paintings that speak to the archipelago’s beauty and its profound ecological losses, Transition invites viewers to reflect on how human arrival has re-shaped forests, birds, and the very soundscape of Aotearoa’s bush.

Aotearoa New Zealand’s archipelago - a cluster of hundreds of relatively small islands at the bottom of the planet - bears a lamentable distinction. It is often described as the bird extinction capital of the world, with more than one quarter of all human-caused bird extinctions worldwide occurring here.

A painter’s lens on science and place - Martinson’s practice bridges empirical insight with the intimate experience of years spent observing New Zealand’s flora and fauna. The exhibition explores how scientific understanding informs our grasp of ecosystems while recognizing the personal, sensory and surreal experience of place—the textures of leaves, the hush of a dawn, and the enduring music that remains only as memory in the wake of extinction.

A central and ongoing motif in Martinson’s works is the Huia - a dark greenish monarch of the forest that once heralded the dawn chorus with its flute-like song. The works render the huia as a powerful symbol of both loss and reverence, acknowledging shared responsibility across Māori and European histories for the species’ decline while honoring a collective love for this iconic songster across generations.

Martinson often uses the Monarch butterfly as metaphor as well. The Monarch butterfly, known as 'the wanderer', serves as a parallel for human dispersal—Africa to distant shores—and for our role as travellers and settlers who re-shape the lives of forests; their creatures, and their remaining mysteries.

Within Transition, Martinson's paintings probe the strange quiet that now characterizes many ecosystems. Silence becomes a trace of memory, an ecological footprint, and a prompt to consider what living forests require to heal or adapt. Birds lie sleeping in the forest or within museum-like cabinets and vitrines highlighting these species as creatures to study, but most importantly - to treasure, in memory and in life.