Imbued with the euphoria Elizabeth Thomson remembers feeling as a young girl on a bicycle hurtling down the precipitous streets and driveways of her childhood suburb, ‘My Titirangi Years’ also marks a re-entry into the many-layered reality of the Waitakere Ranges which both attracted and scared her. Beyond their autobiographical impetus, the works take further flight, propelled onwards by their in-dwelling narratives of scientific discovery, art history and of European and Maori mythologies. Stepping beyond the boundaries of the rational and the ordered, Elizabeth Thomson’s works take us back to the ‘cherished island’ of childhood experience, bringing to the fore the deepening mysteries and artistic challenges intrinsic to such terrain.