About
Moya Deacon Radley is a contemporary artist based in Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand, whose practice explores belonging, place, memory and the quiet relationship between human beings and the natural world.
Working primarily in oil, Moya creates botanical paintings, landscapes and still-life works that invite slow looking and contemplation. Flowers, waterways, mountains and everyday objects become starting points for exploring presence; not simply what a place or object looks like, but what it means to encounter it, inhabit it and form a relationship with it.
Academically trained in Philosophy and Social Anthropology, Moya’s practice is deeply informed by phenomenology, the philosophical exploration of lived experience and our embodied relationship with the world. Painting is, for her, a way of paying attention: of slowing down sufficiently to encounter the familiar anew. Through the act of making, observation becomes interpretation, and the external world becomes intertwined with memory, emotion and personal experience. Her paintings seek to create a space where looking can become a form of reflection.
Her connection to place is also shaped by her South African heritage and her life in Aotearoa. Her work reflects an ongoing conversation between these landscapes and identities: the red earth, expansive skies and distinctive landscapes of South Africa alongside the braided rivers, mountains and changing light of Canterbury. Ideas of belonging, home and connection are recurring threads throughout her work.
Her botanical paintings explore the transient nature of beauty and the quiet complexity of growth, change and impermanence. Rather than simply depicting flowers, Moya is interested in what they might evoke: tenderness, memory, vulnerability, resilience and becoming. Her landscapes similarly seek to capture not only a physical location, but a felt sense of being within a place.
Moya has exhibited throughout the South Island of New Zealand, including at the Kaiapoi Art Expo and Cashmere Club exhibitions. Her work is held in private collections in New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Canada, reflecting the international reach of her practice.
For Moya, painting is ultimately a way of being in relationship with the world: an invitation to look more closely, to notice what might otherwise be overlooked, and to find meaning in the spaces between seeing and experiencing.
