Janet Mazenier & Sarah Treadwell - Sea Texts: Preview Catalogue

Opening - Friday 29th May 5.30-7pm

Sanderson are pleased to present the exhibition Sea Texts 

The title Sea Texts offers a conceptual frame through which to consider the practices of Janet Mazenier and Sarah Treadwell. In both cases, the sea operates as a field of inscription: a surface upon which memory, place, and material encounter are written and rewritten.

In Mazenier’s cold wax paintings, the sea emerges through processes of accretion, erasure, and sedimentation. Pigment is layered, scraped back, and reworked, producing surfaces that resemble tidal zones - threshold spaces where matter is continuously reconfigured. Her works read as palimpsests: gestural marks hover like half-erased scripts, suggesting that the sea itself “writes” through weather, erosion, and duration. The title Sea Texts thus resonates with her phenomenological concern for the space between - between land and water, presence and disappearance, material and memory. The sea becomes a temporal text, its surface carrying traces of atmospheric affect and lived encounter.

Treadwell’s paintings and drawings also posit the sea as a liquid accumulation of stories, hopeful projections and material uncertainty. Histories, dreams and nightmares thicken its depths and enliven the surfaces offering accounts of aquatic beginnings and future arid conditions. Treadwell’s Sea texts trace and repeat both observed inscriptions and underlying imaginary messages. Her work engages the horizon which, like the crease of a book that turns pages, in turning, cultivates the escaping narratives.

For both artists, then, the sea functions as a material and conceptual author. It inscribes through movement, light, and erosion, while the painting becomes an interface where those inscriptions are registered. Sea Texts names this reciprocal act: painting as reading, and the sea as a shifting, affective becoming.

Artist Bios

Janet Mazenier

Based in Te Hau Kapua Devonport in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Janet Mazenier's visual art practice has developed over more than fourteen years through sustained studio inquiry, formal art education, and international research. This trajectory has culminated in the completion of a PhD (Creative Practice) in May 2026, alongside a MFA (1^st class Hons.) and BFA. Through exhibitions, residencies, and research-led practice, she has maintained a long-term and focused commitment to contemporary painting.

Janet's practice centres on the affective, material, and phenomenological dimensions of place, its spirit, memory, and temporal depth, where land operates as an active agent in the formation of the work.

Her research has been grounded in place-based inquiry across Aotearoa New Zealand and Ireland, supported by residencies and exhibitions, and further expanded through exhibiting in Iceland. These experiences have fostered a strong commitment to cross-cultural exchange and to contributing actively to artist communities locally and internationally.

Sarah Treadwell

Graduating in architecture in 1977 Sarah Treadwell registered and practiced in Pōneke Wellington and London, returning to Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland for an academic position at the School of Architecture, University of Auckland, in 1981. She worked there teaching and researching in drawing and architectural design until 2017. Sarah subsequently trained in painting in 2018 and currently pursues her own art practice.

Images of architecture and its complicated grounds have been the primary focus of Sarah Treadwell’s written and drawn research. She has published on gender, motels, interiority and on the work of contemporary artists including Barbara Tuck, Maureen Lander and Pauline Rhodes. Sarah’s artwork has been exhibited at Te Tuhi, Pakuranga, the Gus Fisher Gallery, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau, the Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University Te Herenga Waka, Pōneke Wellington and Pātaka Art+Museum, Porirua, and Silo 6, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.