MARGARET FEENEY

Margaret Feeney’s objects form a danse macabre, dancing to the brink of a viable life in our world. They are dancing to different beats. Do you want to waltz to the end, or march? Or stay where you are with the one step.

They are monumental objects made of card and paper. They’re kind of stern; they wear a dark palette with pinstriped circles running down them. They’re dressed in their best Sunday/ Birthday/ Business suits for the important meeting they are gracefully sidestepping towards.

Margaret sees the running pinstripes having symmetry with the sand as it falls into the sea, taking the plants and the small animals with it. The objects have no eyes, because damn their eyes.

Margaret makes work to think about the hijacking of the natural world and the human-built world by the modern market system - which leads to looking at information space and machine learning. Her current focus is A Black Comedy in Pastels which plays with humans shifting from nature to culture, as if we are not a part of nature, but something apart. The project was the focus of her (anti)residency at The Arquetopia Foundation, Puebla, Mexico, 2024, and is the subject of an upcoming show at artist-run gallery Rice Pudding in Wellington in 2025.

She shares these ideas through public sculpture. Recent work includes wild animal habitats for Sculpture On The Gulf 2022, Waiheke Island peninsula, and Sculpture In The Gardens 2021, Auckland Botanic Gardens. Margaret also explores these ideas through Collective Invention workshops with outsider communities, to make ephemeral public installations of the discoveries. The idea of the public work is to form points of mediation and meditation between the natural world and the human built world. The core kaupapa is to recognise the mauri of other animals.

Her studio work seeks the dark and embraces the ridiculous. She lives and works at Port Waikato, Aotearoa. 

INGA FILLARY

In the article “Climate Change Is Not a Problem: Speculative Realism at the End of Organization”, Dr Norah Campbell takes the provocative stance that climate change is an already-actualised reality. But rather than fall into despondency, she explores this as an opportunity to re-assess our dynamic relationship with the ecosystem.  Campbell's "bleak optimism" concept acknowledges the devastating impact on civilisation while envisioning new possibilities for creative and just ethics, politics and reason - new organisational forms without precedent. Accordingly, this suite of work responds to the challenge of reimagining our relationship with the environment. It takes the shapes of items of human dross, once buried and now relinquished by the sand. They are cast in compost to suggest the possibility of new growth, and hope to explore the seed of promise for our mutable environment and a redemptive future.

Inga Fillary’s practice advocates for the idea that no knowledge is certain. Political thinking often represses the uncertainty of reality by insisting on the meaning and form of individual life. The work accepts uncertainty and contingency as facets of reality that could offer the possibility to re-frame and view life through a wider lens; thereby revealing complexities and nuances that lie beneath the surface. Her practice is intentionally protean, employing various materials and processes to create situations in which she relinquishes control over outcomes. Recent works attempt to explore philosophies that embrace contingency and uncertainty. ‘Low hierarchy’ substances and materials disturbed from their former authority are the cornerstone of her practice.

Inga lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. She holds of a Master of Fine Arts with First Class Honours and is a Doctoral Candidate at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland.

MICHELLE MAYN

“The works for Onepū started with a providential gift of timing – a chance to give before taking. On a cool October morning in 2024, a group of locals and I met to plant kōwhangatara (spinifex) and small patches of pīngao (golden sand sedge) on an eroded dune face. I learnt a little of the dune system, fed by ocean currents, wind and rain – and impacted by the paths cut by human feet and vehicular wheels. And of the habitat that the plants thrive on – poor soils, untouched by nitrogen feeding lupins.

In my mind’s eye I see the vastness of the dune landscape visually encased within the boundaries of the wide river-mouth, sheltering hills, a driving wind and quiet backyards of Port Waikato. Elemental forces and fine, upright fibres dominate the scene with hues of silver, gold and brown. Plants are buried to their tips, sand is blown up dunes, before sifting downward, protective fence-lines engulfed and steep banks drop to the sea.

Materially I had in mind to work with familiar fibres of harakeke and pīngao. These seemed an obvious choice but on this visit their sparse presence made me reluctant to harvest. A few weeks earlier I had been offered pīngao from the East Cape (dug up and damaged by wild horses) and this seemed an appropriate gift exchange. In working with this golden fibre, commonly used by weavers, I hoped to raise the awareness of the declining plight of this coastal species. Harakeke fibres from the nearby pā harakeke of Auckland Botanic Gardens (Manurewa) would form the weaving foundation, while wharariki (mountain flax, Phormium cookianum) seed capsules from my place of work in Auckland CBD would add colour to the fibres.

Many hours of preparation for a large-scale work followed, with intermittent visits to spend time walking the dunes, watching the growth of our plantings and the changes over a few short months. A New Years weaving hui in Kawhia, not far down the coast was also a time of learning through korero, sharing and weaving. I was warned that pīngao is the preferred nesting place for the katipō spider. The spiders endangered status reflects the continuing decline of pīngao and the increasing pressure on the sand dune systems, from their front beach edge with sea level rise, and urban development from the rear.

Over early summer, Wharariki seed capsules & seeds were steeped, boiled and left to stand, yielding pale mauves and brown hues for the prepared muka whenu (strands). Delicate skeletonised wharariki seed capsules were a serendipitous by-product. The delicate inner working of the plants structure felt relevant to the project, not just in their silken, self-dyed colour but in the hidden secrets of the seed-stacking structure contained within each pod. A month later the harakeke seeds (from Auckland) were ripe and full of seed and the process was repeated with soft chocolate brown added to my working palette. With fibres mostly prepared I worked on small pīngao tauira (samplers) using the seed tips of pīngao and damaged older fibres that might otherwise be overlooked.

Working with such a talented cohort of mothermother artists fed into the work through conversations and time together. Jana, one of our local artists, watched the harakeke flowers maturing in the dunes and helped me gather just enough, perfectly formed, seed capsules for a small weaving in early February. The spinifex female inflorescence where abundantly piled at our feet and a handful were gathered. Back in the studio their spikes fell apart and a tiny petal of pearlescent creamy white was revealed at the base of each seed. In an intense, and seemingly timeless, burst of making that comes with the discovery of a newly found material, the spikey balls were promptly pulled apart and woven together again. The small scale of these works called for an acute attention to detail and with each material discovery my plans for the large-scale work became less relevant than staying true to revealing the minute and exquisite details of material that had come to hand.

The time spent in the Port Waikato landscape, and with materials present in the dunes, has driven my making over the past few months. My mind is somewhat empty of any bigger meaning or context to the series and I have found that quite refreshing. . .to step out of my over-thinking mind for a few moments (or hours) as fingers and materials find new ways of doing and being together. One informing and working with the other, seeking understanding of what was, what is and what might be.

A conversation over coffee with the couple who gifted the pīngao did remain at the forefront of my mind “we don’t try to control the sand, it is in constant movement and will go where it wants to go”.

Michelle Mayn works within the realms of textile, crafting, Māori weaving and installation.  Born and based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Mayn works primarily with harakeke (New Zealand flax) incorporating universal methods of weaving, binding, twining and knotting, Textile installations and small-scale woven sculptures explore a vibrant and lively material world.  Mayn exhibits regularly in solo and group shows both nationally and internationally. Recent exhibitions include; CONTEXTILE, Contemporary Textile Art Biennial, Portugal (2022); Sculpture in the Garden, Auckland (2021-22); breathing space/space breathing, St Paul Street Gallery, Auckland (2023). education includes Masters of Visual Arts with Honours (First Class), Auckland University of Technology (2020); Traditional and Contemporary Māori Weaving, Unitec (2011) and Mixed Media studies at The Art Students League of New York (2017).

MELANIE ROSS 

Arriving at Port Waikato, Melanie encountered large fragments which she recognised as sculptural paintings resting high on the black sandy cliffs. Reclaiming Integrity, responds to the human tendency of wanting to hold on and control. Collecting and handling these fragments has been Melanie’s most ambitious and weighty work. Frustrated seeing them crumble every time they were moved, it became clear to Melanie that the works not only spoke to the loss of land through erosion at Port Waikato, but, also mirrored her personal life, trying to reclaim her integrity after the recent loss of her marriage. The only solution, to build a new, stronger foundation. This is also the approach of the Sunset Beach Surf Club. To reclaim the integrity of the land, seeking ways to rebuild a stronger more resilient foundation for their carpark and club rooms.

Melanie Ross’s sculptural practice explores the expressive potential of found objects and the stories they carry. Initially valued for their strength, these mundane, discarded materials have lost integrity through a force induced transformation. Situating these objects in the gallery is a means for her to question underlying systems of hierarchy, value and ethics. She sees her artistic role as one of curation, to ‘curate’ meaning to care. These objects become gently held on removable handmade supports as she is interested in the potential that exists for matter and life to constantly transform, never complete, but continuing to unfold. Ross holds a Master of Fine Arts (1st Class Hons) from Whitecliffe College.

NAT TOZER

Nat Tozer buried stretched canvases in a dune at Port Waikato. Buried November 2024 and then unearthed February 2025. She seeks to learn about local ecological systems through observation.

Nat Tozer explores narratives of the underground to unearth objects and knowledge. She attempts to dig, cast, frottage, film, imagine and animate the ground – splicing an expanded geological inquiry with science fiction and mythology. Working across moving image, materiality and social sculpture, she is interested in folk tales, the revision of mythologies into a local ecologies, tunnelling, anarchist anthropology and network theories.

Recent shows include Erotic Geologies Gow Langsford, Onehunga (2024), ABSTRAXT ABSTRAXT at Northart (2024), The Metamodern in Literature, Art, Education, and Indigenous Cosmologies: An Interdisciplinary Symposium at AUT (2023), Deucalion & Pyrrha, Sluice Biennial, PADA Residency, Lisbon Art Weekend (2022), Māter Mater at Silo 6 (2022), Companion Pieces at Public Record (2021), National Contemporary Art Award finalists exhibitions at Waikato Museum (2022, 2021).

She is the founder and curator of mothermother ARI which continues to support curatorial activism for underrepresented artists since 2019.

JANA WOOD

Ngati Raukawa ki te tonga/Ngati Pakeha

Jana is a semi-abstract painter, with a focus on colour, light and energy. Her research and methodologies focus on pre-Renaissance methods within a contemporary context. Observing fragility and the passing of time through natural phenomena allows a deep connection to Whenua, Moana and Awa. Specifically, Port Waikato has been a focus for some time. It is the location of Jana’s wharemahi and kainga, her home and studio.  

For this show Jana focussed on gravity and heaviness; the soaking and slumping of the sand-dune system at Sunset Beach.  The weight is present both materially and psychologically, as each year she watches the dunes recede, collapse and erode away.  She feels an underlying sense of helplessness, and thinks it’s integral to make work about the shifting sand, as it affects her small community so profoundly .  

The materials used, and the methodologies in studio are as sustainable as possible.  They hark back in time to the experiments of early civilisations; the grinding of pure earth pigments, calcium carbonate, egg yoke, rabbit skin glue and iron sand, and pure synthetic pigment as contrast.

Jana received her Bachelor of Visual Arts in 2015 from AUT, and a Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Arts from Elam in 2018.

Recent exhibitions include All-at-Onceness at Corbans Art Estate, National Contemporary Art Award at Kirikiriroa Waikato Museum, and Three Painters at McLeavey Gallery.