Honey I Understand

Celebrated Māori-Australian artist Sarana Haeata makes her Newport exhibition debut in April with Honey I Understand. Based in Margaret River, Haeata has built a distinctive painting practice that explores movement, surrender and the emotional landscapes of motherhood through layered abstraction and sketch-like figurative forms.

“Honey I Understand looks at the shared threads that run through many women’s lives, especially through motherhood,” says the artist, who was named a finalist in the 2025 National Emerging Art Prize, with her shortlisted work published in Belle magazine among the editors’ picks from the program. “It speaks to the feeling of being caught in the churn of responsibilities, expectation and unwavering movement that pervades everyday life.”

Haeata has exhibited internationally with Tappan Collective in Los Angeles and held solo exhibitions in Sydney. In addition to her Belle feature, her work has appeared in Vogue Living and other leading art, design and lifestyle publications. Honey I Understand represents a marked broadening in scope for an artist whose star is on the rise, even as her work remains intimately attuned to inner worlds, daily rhythms and emotional nuances – all observed and gently expressed through fluid undulations of vivid tonality and tempered effulgence.

“There’s a quiet understanding that passes between women who recognise this feeling in each other,” says Haeata, who finds calm not in stillness, but in yielding to motion itself. “The work explores that space between losing yourself and slowly finding yourself again, and the small moments of freedom and clarity that can appear in the middle of it all.”

For enquiries, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au