Kiata Mason is most known for her colourful still-life paintings as well as her mixed media works on paper. Kiata’s paintings centre around the idea of creating a space to pull the community together, often around a table laden with food. Utilising objects with history, many which are familiar and many which are not, Mason plays with the tension between the past and the present, and the idea that nothing and no one can exist without history, without something that came before it. We are all tied to some past. We are all tied to each other.

Says Kiata of her work, “In depicting the sharing of food, I hope to create an energetic space full of generosity and collaboration, revelling in the colours as a rich acknowledgement of how much we have to exchange and learn from one another, and a recognition of our ultimate interconnectedness.

“This scene was brought fourth by many sessions painting by night. There is a peace and silence that settles over the studio as the sun sinks below the horizon. The scene is a celebration of work that I admire and look up to, and am inspired by, much as I admire and look up to and am inspired by the moon.”

Portraying narrative through her curated table-scapes, Kiata explores the interplay between human connection, emotion, politics and the lived experience of being an artist. Her work is both deeply personal and universal to the human condition.