Various Artists with Sofia & Maya

The National Grid is a graphic design journal based in Aotearoa. Having started publishing in 2006 with the editorship of Jonty Valentine and Luke Wood, The National Grid became recognised for its dedication to graphic design research, practices, and features from local and international practitioners and theorists, having a unique, expansive view of graphic design that embraced its social and cultural impact as a whole. 

After the project came to a halt in 2012, Luke Wood, Matthew Galloway, and Katie Kerr have now revived the journal for 2025, with issue 9 set to launch on Monday. Not quite a ‘magazine’ and not quite an ‘academic journal’, The National Grid seeks to walk the line between professional practice and academia, and art and design, with its 9th issue taking on the current climate of design education, looking back to Pasifika publishing histories, and sketching out diagrams for possible futures. 

Sofia had a kōrero with co-editor and co-founder, Luke Wood, about its beginnings and where The National Grid is now.

What we choose to remember is a group show bringing together artists Hiria Anderson-Mita, Köken Ergun, Tada Hengsapkul, and Kulimoe’anga Stone Maka, currently showing at Gus Fisher Gallery. 

Together, through their respective practices and materiality, the artists question and inquire into ideas of nation building and national identities – each contemplating different histories of the respective geographical and political landscapes they connect to, questioning the way we remember these pivotal moments. With a plurality in voices, the space invites a reflection on the multiplicity of experience, but also the closeness of these respective accounts. As a whole, the exhibition asks us to reflect on these narratives and connect them back to our present – if this is how these moments in history have been remembered, how will we remember our present when it too becomes history? 

Sof had a kōrero with Director and Curator of Contemporary Art at Gus Fisher Gallery, Lisa Beauchamp, about the show, the artists’ works, and the thematic conceptions that bind them.

Sof had a kōrero with Director and Curator of Contemporary Art at Gus Fisher Gallery Lisa Beauchamp about their current group exhibition, What we choose to remember.

And Maya caught up with artist Eva During about her current show on at The Arts House Trust at Pah Homestead, Under The Bridge. 

Adrienne Vaughan is a Tāmaki-based painter, driven by her boundless fascination and exploration of her mediums. In which she produces beautiful abstract paintings that employ an enriched vocabulary of colour, line, shape and form, and brings them into a world of her own. The forms themselves hover in a space of peculiarity, hinting to a kind of still life with a touch of surrealism, embodying a mysterious cast of characters.

Her current exhibition at Anna Milles Gallery Blue Myrtle, showcases a shift in Vaughan's painting practice, a slowing down of sorts, to allow for a new sense of intimacy with the painted surface. A softening and more tender approach to her use of pattern making within the canvas. letting the paints inherit materiality and its trace of application linger on the painting's surface, creating its own sense of pattern making within the painted image. 

Maya had a kōrero with Adrienne Vaughan about the show and overall practice.