Peata Larkin’s paintings operate at the junction of diverse visual and conceptual traditions. Cultural narratives from her Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, and Ngāti Tuhourangi background are encoded in patterns that allude to digital information, binary opposites, and the gridlines of weaving.

At the heart of Larkin’s practice is the use of paint in a way that exploits its physical properties. According to a set pattern, paint is pushed through cavities in the mesh and slices in the linen from the back to create painterly ‘pixels’ on the surface of each work. Up close, Larkin’s works are tactile and sculptural; emphasizing the materiality of the medium she uses. As distance is placed between the viewer and the work, these individual elements come into focus as part of an overall pattern. The painting’s reading shifts from an exploration of painterly process, form, and plasticity to a matrix containing specific information to be decoded.

This shift from concrete to abstract illustrates the socio-cultural dualities that Larkin continues to explore. She draws from twentieth-century theories of abstraction in painting and at the same time uses patterns which are layered with meaning and firmly embedded within Te Ao Māori.