Is it beautiful? That’s the question Sara Langdon asks herself when composing portraits of Auckland’s volcanic peaks and the homes that appear to grow from their soils — built forms intricately woven into wide green canopies.
As a graduate, Sara’s first foray into the arts was as a photographer. After spending time teaching art, followed by four years based in London, it was the return home to Auckland that prompted Sara to focus solely on painting.
“When we moved into our home, which overlooked Mt Wellington, I saw the collective maunga in a different light and fell in love with their significance but also their individual beauty. My family has a long history living in Auckland. Its landscape and landmarks have been part of my everyday experience since childhood: picnics in Cornwall Park, climbing One Tree Hill, driving up Mt Eden as a teenager, exploring the tunnels at North Head, wedding photos on Mt Victoria. These are the landmarks of home.”
It was this connection that led Sara to focus on the depiction of Auckland’s volcanic peaks, an ongoing series of urban landscapes that seek to explore the specific beauty of place through light and texture. Her photographer’s eye is evident in the careful compositions that often crop out the wider identifiable features of a scene, leaving only the maunga, trees, and houses dotted between them. Across rolling green terraces and shadowy craters, these dormant peaks are infused with a softness — a stillness that invites contemplation.
Last year, a new body of work began to take shape: Silver Linings.
“These are treescapes, which are distinctly ‘New Zealand’ but without the wider visual clues of an exact place; they are pieces composed as timeless portraits of the bush,” Sara explains. “Within both bodies of work run common threads of home and beauty, two of the most prominent themes in my work to date. My work is not just replicating the landscape but a response to the beauty I see there.
“My exploration centres around the importance of place as a cornerstone of our individual and shared stories of connection; the landscapes that become part of our identity and create a sense of belonging.”
The meticulously detailed realism of Sara’s work invites the viewer to engage with the layered landscape, which is presented almost as if it were a portrait or the protagonist in a novel. Within the detail emerges an innate character — perhaps experienced more vividly by those who have inhabited, or have links to, Tāmaki Makaurau. Sara’s Silver Linings works were recognised at national art awards last year, with her painting O te Ngahere receiving both the Michael Evans Award for a Figurative Work and the People’s Choice Award at the 2024 Walker & Hall Waiheke Art Awards, and Evergreen winning the People’s Choice Award at the NZ Painting and Printmaking Awards.
View more of Sara’s work at Parnell Gallery.
