As The Moon Holds The Sun’s Gaze

As the moon holds the sun's gaze features new works by Belinda Whitta, Kaia Waite, Kieran Trainor and Sage Rossie-Tong. Their practices form a web of relationality that traces light and shadow, ancestry, identity and ecological rhythms – reflecting what is revealed, what remains hidden, and how we care for both.

Belinda’s work draws from ancestral sites as spaces of knowledge that is felt, inherited, and gently carried. Through analogue photographic processes, her practice attends to what resists visibility. Darkness, or the unknown, is not absence, but a vessel – an elder space where memory, ritual and abundance gathers. This reverence flows into Kaia’s practice, where laser-etched wood is engraved, filled and sanded back to a place of cyclical return. Working with personal taonga, Kaia’s practice is grounded in whakapapa and pūrākau, carefully negotiating what is shared and what is protected.

Kieran’s practice moves fluidly across disciplines, following a path of light that stretches across bodies, land, and time. Painting becomes an embodied act of sensing how light transforms all it touches – offering warmth and connection while marking thresholds of care. Sage’s intricate chainmail web draws all of these threads together. Both home and battleground, the web becomes a site of creation, nourishment and death. Rooted in queer methodologies, Sage’s practice asks us to sit with our own entanglements and how we inhabit, intervene, and remain accountable to the ecosystems we are part of.

As the moon holds the sun's gaze expands outward – river and well, light and dark, past and present – allowing multiple truths to coexist. Meaning is not carried by a single narrative, but by the strength of the web itself. Through this collaboration, an exhibition has emerged that is slow and porous – reflecting on what it means to collectively tend, witness, and hold what is visible and what remains in shadow.

EXHIBITION DETAILS

What: As the moon holds the sun’s gaze – Belinda Whitta, Kaia Waite, Kieran Trainor and Sage Rossie-Tong

Opening: Thursday, 29 January, 5.30pm – all artists will be present.

When: 30 January – 21 February 2026

Where: Twentysix Gallery, 26 Constable Street, Omārōrō Newtown, Wellington Pōneke

Gallery hours: Thursday 12–6, Friday 12–6, Saturday 10–4, or by appointment

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