Various Artists with Sofia & Maya

The Elam Graduate Show special! 

This week, Sof and Maya visit the Elam Graduate Show, interviewing BFA graduates Yana Sanvictores, Sophie Drury, Keira Haig, Ella Rowe, and Fabian Strauch, as well as MFA graduates Michael McClelland and Thea Long. 

You can go see their work, as well as the rest of the graduating cohort’s, at the Elam Fine Arts Studios at 20 Whitaker Place this Saturday 29th and Sunday 30th November, from 10AM to 4PM. 

You can also visit the online portfolio of work and creative practice research from previous graduate students here, where this year’s graduates’ work will be posted shortly as well. 

Whakarongo mai! <3

Heidi Brickell (Te Hika o Pāpāuma, Ngāti Kahungunu ki Tāmaki-nui-ā-Rua, Rongomaiwahine, Rangitāne, Ngāi Tara, Ngāti Apakura, Airihi, Kōtimana, Ingarangi, Tiamana) is an Ōtaki-based multidisciplinary artist. 

Her current solo exhibition at the Arts House Trust at Pah Homestead, Wā Dividends, takes pieces from its larger body, which was originally commissioned by Director Sophie Davis at Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga | Hastings Art Gallery for the exhibition, Wā We Can’t Afford, having been developed in a six-week residency in Heretaunga as the gallery’s inaugural visiting artist. 

Bringing this body of work into a new space and context, and retitled as Wā Dividends, here Brickell places these fluent ‘exploded paintings’ in conversation with rimurapa (native bull kelp) sculptural pieces as gathered from the shores of Ōtaki and Te Raekaihau in one space – questioning the value of our time in relation to matauranga Māori, capitalism, and our worsening climate crisis; opening up her practice to fluctuate between the spiritual, relational, and existential. 

Sofia caught up with Heidi Brickell about Wā Dividends, beginning their kōrero by asking Heidi about the origins of this body of work and her experience during her artist residency in Heretaunga at the end of last year.

Georgia Arnold is a Tāmaki-based multidisciplinary artist working intuitively across a range of mediums, including drawings, ceramics, painting, metalwork and sculpture. 

In her current exhibition at Melanie Roger Gallery, Retreat, Arnold draws inspiration from her time spent house-sitting in Pukekohe, letting her semi-rural surroundings, new routines, and everyday encounters inform the direction of a new body of mixed media drawings and sand cast charms. Using her art-making as an escape from conflict and a canvas for healing, the works embrace the chaos, tension, and potential for a messy, expressive, and loud autobiography, obscuring the subjects of her introspection in the process. 

Sof had a kōrero with Georgia Arnold about Retreat and her overall practice.

Julia Holderness is a Ōtautahi-based artist, producing beautiful installations that combine an array of mediums such as mixed media fabrications, ceramics, textile, and painting. Speaking to Holdernesse's continued dialogue and exploration of modernism, specifically to alternative histories of female modernism in New Zealand. 

Within her current show, The Room at Ashenby showing at Sanderson Contemporary Holderness looks to the scene of the Charleston house as a source of inspiration. Presenting a body of hand decorated ceramics, vessels and tiles, alongside selected watercolours from her studio archive. Bringing the viewer into this intimate and domestic site of memory and imagination.

Maya caught up with Julia about the show and overall practice.