Is New Zealand a backwater or a paradise? The answer is not, and has never been, simple. For modernist writer Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), still arguably the country’s most famous export, it was both, as it likely was for many colonial settlers oscillating between feelings of exile and dominion.

The two works in “Kōtiro, Emepaea” (Girl, Empire), the recent exhibition by George Watson (of Ngāti Porou, Moriori, and Ngāti Mutunga heritage), were based on one of Mansfield’s early stories, “Summer Idyll” (1907). With each piece installed in its own adjoining gallery, and the layout of Te Uru