Claudia Jowitt | Uana: Carried by the Waves | Dowse Art Museum
In her first solo exhibition in a public gallery, Auckland-based artist Claudia Jowitt dives deeply into the sculptural possibilities of paint. The exhibition "Uana: Carried by the Waves" is a luminous celebration of materiality, memory, and cultural resonance—gathering together a body of wall-based and three-dimensional works that feel as much like touchstones as they do works of art.
The title Uana, meaning ‘to be carried away by the waves’ in vosa vakaviti (Fijian), sets the tone for an exhibition where paint becomes a sculptural tool that flows, pools, and grows like the water and coral of an ocean reef. The works speak with the rhythms of the waitui — the seas that surround the islands of Jowitt’s paternal heritage—and evoke the subtle colours, patterns, and textures of the environments that inspire her.
Jowitt’s practice is also steeped in the histories and language of abstraction, drawing on a lineage of artists who have pushed paint beyond the frame—into sculptural space and the realms of process, gesture, and expression. Yet her work also charts its own course, carrying with it motifs and materials that bring together these two quite different currents in her work: shell, coral, masi, and seaweed are inlaid into surfaces thick with paint, resin and other mediums creating a vista of delicate, yet intensely detailed reliefs.
Uana is not only a personal exploration but also a warm invitation into a space where land and sea, tradition and innovation, form and family merge. This exhibition offers a contemplative, encounter with works that not only show the physical building of layer upon layer, but they also interweave moments of cultural memory with contemporary experiences.
The exhibition runs at The Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt from 30 August 2025 - 1 February 2026.
