This Way Up

enamel on board

2025

1200 x 900

A quieter yet profoundly symbolic work, This Way Up, focuses on Aotearoa/New Zealand itself. Lambert has painted the country but flipped it upside down. The composition draws on a memory from his teenage years working the pea harvest in Hastings, where a Maori student who attended Te Aute College once said, “I’m going up to Dunedin.” The phrase stuck with Lambert, disrupting the North is up, South is down orientation inherited from colonial map making. In many traditional Māori worldviews, Aotearoa is often seen from a different perspective, sometimes shown upside down with South as the top. By titling this work This Way Up and placing the country on its head, Lambert questions long held geographic hierarchies and gestures toward indigenous perspectives at a time when New Zealand is once again grappling with its identity and direction.