Rhianna May is a contemporary figurative artist living and working in Mount Maunganui, Aotearoa. Her work explores the emotional landscapes that exist beneath the surface of everyday life, focusing on quiet moments of pause, reflection, and inner shift that often go unnoticed.

Working primarily in oil and pastel, Rhianna uses the language of colour to express sensation and mood, drawing out the tension between vulnerability and strength. While grounded in the tradition of portraiture, her paintings often move beyond likeness, aiming instead to capture a feeling, a flicker of thought, a sense of presence, or the subtle weight of memory.

Her process is instinctive and layered, shaped by gesture, intuition, and emotion. Each work becomes a meditation on the intangible, an attempt to make visible the things we carry but rarely name.