By Mandy Jakich
Conversations with New Zealand Artists
POPUP is a versatile platform for artists, organisations, and venues in Aotearoa to produce their own online experiences. Born out of years of online event production, POPUP allows users to effortlessly create and manage their online events. The platform's immersive...
Dunedin based artist Nic Dempster has been part of the city’s art scene for over twenty years. His bold colourful geometric style has developed out of contemporary landscape work and reflects his love for architecture and design. His works play...
In this episode I'm chatting to Charles Tongue, the founder and CEO of Brother Theo - a platform dedicated to career coaching and legacy planning, tailored specifically for artists. Brother Theo provides a range of perspectives to help artists plan...
Robyn Fleet is a painter from the Hawkes Bay. Her paintings capture the essence of human experiences and our deep connections to the environment. Robyn is obsessed with the materiality of paint itself and all its possibilities.A common thread in...
Sally Bulling is a contemporary New Zealand painter living in Queenstown. Invoking a sense of energy, Sally Bulling's abstract works are created with physical movements, sweeping marks, dripping flicks and elaborate pours. Her love of colour, light and reflection is...
Tim Christie is a designer and artist currently based in Wellington New Zealand.His innovative, fashion-forward artistic style has been described as a modern synthesis of op art, pop art, street art and geometric expressionism. Over the last two years he...
Alison Gilmour is a painter from Auckland, New Zealand. She grew up in Devonport, a coastal suburb in Auckland, which has instilled a deep love of the sea inspiring her to paint it in its many forms. She is also...
This episode is kindly supported by Turua GalleryDominique Marriott is a Waikato-based artist living near Raglan on the west coast. She specialises in life drawing and is well known for her minimalistic nude paintings created with sumi ink and calligraphy...
Raymond Sagapolutele is an Aotearoa NZ-born Sāmoan artist and academic living in Manurewa in Auckland. His photographic practice focuses on his lived experiences, his heritage and his cultural ties to the history of and the lands within the Pacific.In his...
Auckland based artist James Emery has always had a keen interest in art and art history, particularly NZ art from the 1950s and 60s and the American abstract expressionists.Majoring in art history at Auckland Uni James worked within the art...
Jae Frew is a contemporary portrait photographer previously based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland and now living in Mahurangi.Jae's commercial career spans over 30 years and the highly respected and sought-after photographer lists prime ministers, heads of state, TV personalities, corporate...
Artist Michael McHugh is New Zealand born and resides in Sydney Australia. For more than three decades, he has been exploring the vast potential of colour, composition and abstract form with an inquisitive emphasis on the natural world. McHugh believes...
Faleata Ualesi is an emerging contemporary Samoan Artist living in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. His current work is built around motifs shown through grids and pacific patterns.I loved meeting Faleata and welcoming him to my studio (and black taro patch) at...
Tony Ogle is known as one of New Zealand’s leading screen printers. He currently lives in Tairāwhiti, Gisborne. Next month in March Tony celebrates a prolific art career of more than 30 years with a retrospective solo exhibition at Parnell...
Tawhai Rickard is a contemporary New Zealand Maori artist born in Gisborne, Tūranganui-a-Kiwa, of Ngati Porou decent.He is influenced by the epic history of his country Aotearoa, New Zealand and its historical interrelationship between Māori and Pakeha to the present...
Esther is a photographic artist living in Greytown in the Wairarapa. She has had a long successful photographic career firstly in wedding photography then in project and portrait photography. Her personal fine art photographic practice has become her main focus...
Naomi Azoulay is a middle-eastern-born, Auckland-based award-winning portrait and mixed media collage artist. Naomi creates captivating, bold, intimate and vibrant mixed media collages and oil paintings. She aims to tackle social justice issues, decolonise the art space and expand the...
Oliver Cain is an English born artist who emigrated to Aotearoa New Zealand in 2013. His work covers a wide range of topics and materials and takes many forms from ceramics to sculpture to installation and painting. His artworks push...
Joshua Davison is a contemporary artist from Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, with a diverse body of work in both realism portraiture and sculptural painting.Josh is a self taught artist who has developed personal techniques which he uses throughout his impasto and...
Tanja McMillan, a.k.a Misery, is an Australian born painter, sculptor, photographer and mural artist living in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Her creative reach is extensive, ranging from highly crafted fine art paintings and wall art to animation and fashion.Tanja’s work, under...
Sierra Roberts is an artist from Wānaka, in the South Island of New Zealand. She creates bold, statement portraits exploring perceptions of beauty and the female experience. Her travels through Australia, Asia, South, Central and Northern America have strongly influenced...
Angela Rowe is an artist, writer, curator and mentor based in Whangārei. Her creative practice includes storytelling across performance, installation, photography, drawing, and textile works. Angela is interested in the future of arts in Aotearoa and how to create a...
Jamie Chapman is a painter based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland. He was born in the United Kingdom and immigrated with his family to New Zealand when he was 2 years old, settling and growing up in Whangarei.Jamie talks about his...
Sofia Athineou is a full-time artist of Greek heritage, based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Her practice is mainly in glass, a medium she sees as having many sensual and optical qualities. Surrounded by the dramatic bush of Auckland’s west coast...
Andrew J. Steel is a New Zealand contemporary artist with a passion for story telling. Over his career he has worked across the mediums of public art, private interiors, fine artwork, letterpress, land, body, photography and digital works. "An artists...
Tanya Blong was our very first guest on the Creative Matters podcast and lucky for us she is back 96 episodes later to talk about her artistic journey since March 2021 and how her practice has developed and evolved. In...
Julie and Michael Freeman are award winning hyperrealistic pastel artists living in Auckland NZ.Julie is currently creating work with the intent of realism beyond the photograph. Her subject matter is varied, from coastal and nautical to the natural fauna and...
Toby Raine is a contemporary artist living in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland. He has a distinctive approach to his work, moving large quantities of oil paint across the surface of a canvas with confident strokes, creating expressive, emotive, gestural paintings.Toby spent...
Matthew Browne is an abstract painter living in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Born in London UK, he relocated to New Zealand in 1991. Matthew's striking geometric paintings feature sharp lines with bold, experimental colour palettes. His process starts in exploring formal...
Fleur Woods is a contemporary fibre artist based in the beautiful rural village of Upper Moutere (near Nelson, New Zealand) She is surrounded by vineyards, hop farms, orchards and country gardens - it makes sense that her work is...
Abstract artist Evan Woodruffe lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. He is a well known, much loved figure in the NZ art world.Evan is an artist with many threads to his practice. Most of his time is spent making work for...
Sean Beldon is a South African born, Auckland-based artist best known for his large New Zealand landscape paintings. His style is mostly painterly with a modernist feel.For more than a decade, Sean has been photographing and painting landscapes from the...
Jasmine Kroeze is an an artist and textile designer living in Papamoa near Mt Maunganui. With a background in the fashion and textile design industry, Jasmine fell into the art world through painting large scale murals as a passion...
Elliot Love is a contemporary artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland. His hyper realistic paintingsdepict cars from the 80's and 90's era set within a city's still and lifeless urban environment.Elliot works in oil on canvas, often on an unusually...
Linda Va’aelua is a full time visual artist and designer of Samoan Scottish heritage. She grew up in the West Auckland suburb of Te Atatu South and is based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland.Linda straddles the worlds of digital graphic...
Frankie Meaden is a textile artist and painter from Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland. She makes giant embroidery artwork from recycled materials.Frankie’s art is almost always botanical, with her large-scale sculptural pieces challenging the scale at which embroidery is usually seen. Frankie...
Mandy Rodger is a contemporary abstract artist based in Auckland, New Zealand.Mandy's first career was in law and in 2014 she began studying painting and drawing at Browne School of Art. Since 2017 her art practice has been her main...
Matt Payne is a landscape painter living on the North Shore, in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Much of Matt’s work is inspired by a love of New Zealand’s landscapes and coastlines, which is reflected in dramatic compositions and depicted with vivid...
Sam Mitchell is a visual artist based in the north west of Auckland, well known for her artworks painted in acrylic on perspex in reverse and watercolour paintings. A sassy and subversive bricolage of rescued materials, painting media and eccentric...
Gavin Chai, born in 1997 in Malaysia, is a figurative painter and artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. He specialises in the traditional technique of oil painting on wooden panels, linen and canvases and paints the world through a subtle...
Marcus Hipa is a Niuean artist born and raised in Alofi, Niue Island, currently living in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa NZ. Drawing, painting and carving are some of the mediums he utilises to explore and share insights of his people's history...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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)....
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 ...
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...
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...
