Artists: Mandy Hague and Lea-Anne Sheather 
Location: Brookfields Lawyers Gallery - Te Kōputu a te whanga a Toi - Whakatāne Library and Exhibition Centre

In Bindings, Whakatāne artists Lea-Anne Sheather and Mandy Hague offer audiences what at first glance looks like a truly fantastical world, filled with curious beasts and shadowy landscapes. But look closer and you will find the universe they are depicting is disconcertingly familiar. Through photographs, paintings, drawings, and collaborative mixed media works, these shamanistic artists show us what lies beneath Earth’s natural beauty – gently, yet poignantly bringing to light the environmental injustices we subject our world to.

Stepping into the gallery space of Bindings is like entering the anteroom of a Renaissance trader, filled with hand-crafted paper maps, strange taxidermal animals, frames of jewel-like insects, and mystifying cultural artefacts. Like the explorers and naturalists of yesteryear, Sheather and Hague are pioneering a contemporary Age of Discovery; back from traversing their respective creative realities, they bring us creatures and landscapes that may actually exist in our world, but that we are unable or unwilling to see.

With family ties running deep in the Whakatāne area, the works of Sheather and Hague speak of stories passed down – and thoroughly relished – through the generations; and of childhood memories of local places that embedded a deep thirst for the enigmatic and wondrous: tales of a White Island sulphur mining great-grandfather escaping death in the mining disaster of 1914, or hours spent wandering nearby beaches selecting shells to add to the family collection. These folk legends have instilled a fierce sense of protection in both artists: a need to shield the natural world around them from the ravages of contemporary society. “If you have a connection to your environment and a set of stories you identify with it, you're less likely to want to damage it,” says Sheather