Creative Connections

Dagmar Dyck is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, art educator and social justice advocate. She is a New Zealander of Tongan and German descent, living in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland. Dagmar graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland in 1995 and was the first woman of Tongan descent to do so. She has spent the last 30 years regularly exhibiting nationally and interna...

Janet Hafoka is a visual artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, working primarily in the medium of photography.  Her art practice focuses on transience and time passing.  Her current work explores both the uncertainty and beauty in the short lived. The centuries old fascination with the ‘golden hour’ is referenced, known as the brief period after sunrise and before sunset when the sun casts a g...

Neville Parker has been a full time sculptor and illustrator since 1995 and he opened his first art gallery in 1996. Since then he has had 7 more distinctly different galleries including 1 in Auckland, 2 in Marlborough and  4 in the Nelson/Tasman region. He has represented more than 400 artists from a variety of disciplines in Aotearoa. His most recent Gallery, Church House Gallery in Motueka, ope...

Sean Hill is a Kiwi Samoan emerging visual artist from Auckland, currently based in New Plymouth. His art practice is influenced by graffiti as well as his heritage, everyday life and the natural environment and includes painting outdoors, graphic design, installation, paintings and prints on clothing. As Gallerist Scott Lawrie says " Sean Hill is one of those rare discoveries - an emerging a...

Auckland based Aimée Ralfini is an artist, design director and the founder of Art Ache. As an artist Aimée works in the digital space, collaborating with other artists to create “campaigns” of their work.  Art Ache believes art is the most potent form of communication and artists are the litmus paper of society. It aims to make art and culture part of the everyday conversation and aims to assist i...

UK born painter Neal Palmer immigrated to New Zealand in 1998 and has been painting full time ever since. Through the exploration of the New Zealand environment he has discovered subjects that evoke strong emotional responses such as Harakeke (NZ flax). He is inspired by the natural forms, composition, spaces and shapes, as well as nostalgic references his botannical subjects provide. Neal blends...

Richard Penn is a South African artist living and working in Auckland, Aotearoa.  His work examines the intersection of scientific and artistic vision, using scale and detail as metaphoric devices to reflect on our invested positions as viewers.  He  works across various media, including painting, drawing, sculpture and animation, exploring the relationship between visual and conceptual abstractio...

Helen Ollivier is a painter living in West Auckland. She graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts in 1997 and since then has had 6 solo exhibitions, participated in group shows and been included in several NZ art publications. In the last few years, she has been busy running art programmes for kids and raising four children of her own, which has left her little time and headspace for her own work....

Sefton Rani works out of Piha, a coastal settlement west of Auckland. He describes himself as a self taught maker who uses paint as his material of choice to create modern Pacific art. Paint skins are collaged or simply allowed to float as a sculptural object. He encourages the apparent ageing of his work surfaces to show the lineage and journey of both the materials and of the migrant Pacific peo...

Rebecca Hazard is a young emerging artist currently based in Tãmaki Makaurau Auckland, working primarily with oil paints. Rebecca's current work references raw meat to investigate our tangibility within existence and her own social concerns, offering the viewer a moment of mindfulness and philosophical reflection.  Her oil paintings are large scale with a limited palette of vibrant colour. Al...

Bonco, aka Paul Nathan, is a visual artist living in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. He predominantly paints with oil on linen and sometimes makes sculpture and textiles.  https://www.boncosmos.com/ Bonco explores the language of geometric abstraction, signs and symbols and is interested in discovering the spiritual, through an investigation of the modernist grid and its variations.   In this episode we...

Sarah Oostendorp is a contemporary emerging artist from Southland Aotearoa and currently living in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland. Her art practice focuses on the state of mind whilst in the midst of creating labour-intensive drawings of repeated circular movements using paint. Viewers are provoked to create their own narrative in the drawing, as figures, landscapes and textures begin to appear amongst...

Olivia  Asher is an emerging multidisciplinary artist currently studying at Auckland University's Elam School of Fine Arts. In this episode Olivia shares her experiences as a second year student at Elam School of Fine Arts. We talk about how the school is set up, the application process, the papers and electives offered in different semesters, the recording and assessment systems, the critiqu...

Stephen Templer is an artist and illustrator previously from Wellington and now living in Kumeu, in the north west of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. His art practice includes street art, murals, graphic design, prop and concept design, illustration for children's books and community art and festival projects. His work has elements of humour and tells playful stories, connecting people to form shar...

Virginia Woods-Jack is a British-born photographic artist and curator currently living and working in Aotearoa New Zealand. She is also the founder/curator of Women in Photography NZ & AU .  Virginia's  art practice explores notions of connection to place, materiality and memory to consider relationships between the human and more-than-human worlds. By doing so, she aims to understand how...

Logan Moffat is a painter who graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts with a BFA Honours in 2018. Since then he has been painting full time from his little studio in Pukekohe, in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland. Capturing the portraits of people through highly detailed oil paintings at uni began his interest and exploration of painting. These early studies of people have since evolved into paintings tha...

Grace Thresher is an artist, exhibition coordinator and marketing creative based in Port Waikato, New Zealand. She uses a variety of media in her work; black pen, photographic manipulation, photography, collage and paint, inspired by nature, and things around her.  Each mark is a testament to patience, detail, accuracy and precision. Aiming to create intricacies and dimensionalities, creations the...

Deborah Crowe is a visual artist working in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Her practice involves building 2D and 3D environments that explore architectural, spatial and environmental characteristics. The work often queries perceptions of space, place, human's impact on the environment, systems of containing the body and language frameworks.  Deborah's practice acknowledges its origins in wove...

Jessica Gurnsey is an 18 year old artist from Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland currently based in Pōneke Wellington.  In 2022 Jess became the youngest ever recipient of the NZ Adam Portraiture Award with her self portrait Lady Day. Her paintings have also been recognised through the National Youth Art Awards where she was the overall winner in 2021 and the winner of her category in 2022, the Kumeu Arts Aw...

Scott Lawrie is an art lover, writer, entrepreneur and the owner and director of the Scott Lawrie Gallery in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Scott Lawrie Gallery aims to connect hearts and minds when it comes to encountering and experiencing contemporary art. They proudly show a range of emerging, mid-career and Internationally-renowned artists from around the world, with a focus on New Zealand, Austral...

Tiffany Singh is a social practice artist, specialising in socially engaged art outcomes. Her practice explores relationships & engagement between arts, culture, health & well-being. She was born in Aotearoa New Zealand of Indian and Pacific decent and is currently living in London UK. Tiffany's work positions the arts as a vital contributor to health and well-being by utilising a fin...

Lauren Kitts is a sculptor living in the Tasman area at the top of the South Island who works mostly in stone but also in bronze and wood. Lauren has gained international recognition as a professional sculptor over the last 30 years. She exhibits on a regular basis and now has her own sculpture gallery in the Tasman area on her 13 acre property. Her inspiration is the natural world where form and...

Glen is a sculptor born and raised in the UK and now a NZ resident living in Napier. His contemporary sculptures are made from recycled materials, off-cuts from native timbers, recycled copper, brass and natural elements like stone and wood. Being an innovative craftsman fits comfortably with Glen Colechin’s engineering background. With a past career in product design and production engineering, h...

Elliot is  a text based artist from Tāmaki Makaurau, currently living in Taranaki, who works in an interdisciplinary way. He incorporates painting, language, photography, installation and sculpture to discuss ideas of time, memory and ways we interpret our environment.  Elliot is interested in the art that can inform our lives and can be used as a filter or divining tool to see the world we inhabi...

Valerie Auersperg, also known as Valerism and I Am Valerism , is an Austrian artist living in New Zealand. She creates acrylic paintings and digital drawings depicting pop-surreal scenes in a colourful, dream-like manner. Her work brings a smile and sense of wonder to the viewer. Valerie explores the world inside and around herself, pairing the expected with the unusual. She focuses on themes such...