Makyla Curtis
Makyla Curtis is a poet and printmaker based in Auckland, New Zealand. Makyla has a Master of Arts in New Zealand poetry from the University of Auckland, and recently completed a Master of Visual Arts at Auckland University of Technology. She works with letterpress, botanical printmaking, and mono-printing methods. Her work is place-based She explores ideas of belonging and is guided by plant-life and the landscape. She interrogates ideas of settlement and nation building.
In these two works ‘Pteridomania Series 01’ and ‘Ink Herbarium’ Makyla uses ferns and plant-life collected in the Taranaki region to ask questions of our colonial past, as well as how we find a sense of belonging via the landscape. New Zealand’s Pākehā (NZ European/white) history and sense of nationhood is closely tied to the image of the fern. The fern craze, also called pteridomania, was at its height in British culture at the time The Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840 (New Zealand’s founding document).
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