"Of the few Indigenous voices in Whanganui’s Pākeha dominated contemporary arts scene, I’ve had the pleasure of engaging with Tia Ranginui. During our kōrero, over what seemed like endless cigarettes and gin one evening at Porridge Watson, I began to wish there were more art practitioners and thinkers like Tia celebrated in this town, whose work bravely engages us with the palpable inequity in representation—where power is still socially, politically and economically held by the descendants of those who’ve systemically benefited from colonisation. Tia’s images can be read as reclamations of space, holding with them traces of Tangata Whenua cosmologies, with the occasional use of humorous subcultural mise en scene elements. This 2016 work by Tia presents a human body nestled among harakeke; I read it as a gentler proposal: to consider how an Indigenous body’s indelibly resilient connectivity with whenua still persists, in spite of the histories it has been subjected to. I cannot wait to experience more mahi like this. " - Areez Katki for the May 2023 instalment of the 'My Choice' exhibition series.