Gallery Year: 2027 Exhibition Artists

Sean Hill

Sean Hill is a multidisciplinary artist of Kiwi/Samoan descent based in Ngamotu, Taranaki. He completed an Honours degree in Visual Arts at Auckland University in 2016. Sean’s practice focuses on conceptual exploration using movement, frequency, colour, texture, nature, and materials to express energy in a physical form, creating a visual language often through abstract representations.

Sean has exhibited overseas with Scott Lawrie Gallery (Scotland) and Alcaston Art Gallery (Naarm/Melbourne). His exhibitions include Synchrotopia in 2024 (solo) and 2026 (solo) at Govett-Brewster window space, and Energtopia in 2024 (solo). He received a CNZ emerging artist funding in 2024 and a Govett-Brewster artist residency in Tonga funded by CNZ in 2024. He exhibited at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with Lalaga in 2022 and 2024, was a finalist for NZPPA Awards and Molly Morpeth Canaday Awards in 2025, and created a commissioned sculptural artwork for Te Tuhi Art Gallery, Flowergy, in 2025.

Stevei Houkāmau

Stevei Houkāmau is a full-time uku artist based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. Working with uku (clay) since 2011, her practice considers uku as both body and memory — a material that records touch, carries whakapapa, and anchors the relationships between tāngata, tīpuna, and whenua.

Her work has been exhibited widely across Aotearoa and internationally, and she has undertaken residencies in the United States alongside Indigenous art gatherings throughout the Pacific. Houkāmau has represented Aotearoa at FESTPAC in Guahan and exhibited at Munich Jewellery Week in 2024. In 2023 she received the Kiingi Tūheitia Portraiture Award and held a solo exhibition at Objectspace, Tāmaki Makaurau. She has been invited to the BACA Biennale in Québec, Canada, in 2026. 2027 marks her first inclusion in Sculpture on the Gulf.

Fiona Jack

Fiona Jack is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. She teaches at the Elam School of Fine Arts, Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland. Fiona’s artistic practice ranges from large-scale public commissions to social projects formed through dialogue and research. She draws on recognizable visual and textual languages to examine the systems, social movements, and politics of representation within forms that hold collective memory.

Fiona has curated exhibitions including Portage Ceramic Awards 2025 at Te Uru Contemporary Gallery (2025) and Emory Douglas: Minister of Culture, Black Panther Party at Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland (2009) (with Andrew Clifford). Her writing has been published in Counterfutures, Femisphere, and several artist books. She holds an MFA from CalArts and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Westminster.

Virginia King

Virginia King was born in Kawakawa, Northland. She attended Wellington Polytechnic, then Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland and, while living in London in the 1970s, Chelsea Art School, Hammersmith. Sculpture became her preferred art form in the early 1980s.

Over the past four decades, King has created a portfolio of large-scale, site-specific works for public locations and private collectors. By magnifying and abstracting the scale of natural life forms, she draws attention to the beauty and vulnerability of our environment. Her vessel forms have evolved from symbols of exploration, migration, and nurturing to become symbols of life and survival.

An Antarctic Artist Fellowship in 1999 was a pivotal experience. A visit to the spectacular Lake Vanda strengthened her commitment to the microsphere, marine protozoa, and foraminifera. Enduring themes in her practice include ecology and survival and the delicate balance between sustainability and progress. King continues to create works in her Auckland and Waiheke Island studios.

Emily Karaka, Reuben Kirkwood

Emily Karaka is a leading figure in contemporary Māori art and has been the recipient of The Tylee Cottage and McCahon House residencies, with her works held in most major art institutions in Aotearoa and in a number of significant private collections. She has an extensive career, being included in the landmark exhibition Te Waka Toi (1992), which opened in San Diego, California to coincide with the America’s Cup Race and toured throughout Canada; Five Māori Painters (2014), Auckland Art Gallery: Toi o Tāmaki; NIRIN, 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020); Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art (2021); solo survey exhibition Ka Awatea, A New Dawn, Sharjah Art Foundation UAE (2024); and Hawaiʻi Triennale Aloha Nō (2025).

For Sculpture on The Gulf 2027, Emily will collaborate with fellow Ngāi Tai Ki Tāmaki mandated mana whenua artist Reuben Kirkwood, whose architectural sculptural works adorn civic and commercial buildings throughout Auckland and whose carved gateways and pou are installed on many sites of significance and on islands in the Hauraki Gulf, including Rangitoto and Motutapu.

Artist Collective: Judy Darragh, Qianye & Qianhe Lin, Sean Kerr

Land Raft: Signals and Collectivity (working title) Wood, metal, electronics, recycled materials.

Judy Darragh ONZM (b. 1957 Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand) is an artist who makes brightly coloured sculptural assemblages, collage, video, and photography. Judy Darragh lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland where she has played a significant role in the development of ARTSPACE Aotearoa, artist-run spaces in Auckland Teststrip and Cuckoo. She was a co-editor of Femisphere, a publication supporting women’s art practices in Aotearoa. Judy is a founder member of Arts Makers Aotearoa, an artist’s advocacy organisation.

Qianye 林千葉 and Qianhe Lin 林千和 (Hailing Island, China; Aotearoa New Zealand) are siblings who work as a duo. They work with multi-channel video installation and publication with a focus on interdisciplinary practice and collaborative processes. They are interested in the material lineage of belief systems and collective understanding, and how disoriented positions make possible multiple truths and a poetics for relation and solidarity. They have exhibited at Auckland Art Gallery, Te Tuhi Contemporary Art Gallery, Coastal Signs, The Physics Room, and Papatūnga. In 2025, they received the Springboard Award in visual arts by the Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi.

Sean Kerr lives in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, where he is Associate Professor at Te Waka Tūhura, Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland. He specialises in real-time 3D, VR, and interactive technologies. Kerr’s practice spans interactive art, mixed realities, physical computing, installation, and sound, with a sustained engagement in emerging technologies documented through exhibitions and publications. His recent projects include dududududududududududu-pssssshhhht! (Whangārei Art Museum, 2024), Ba Dum Tss (Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, 2024), and A random rant (Lightship, Auckland, 2022). Collaborative works include In Kahoots with Judy Darragh (Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetū, 2020–21).

Ioane Ioane & Martin Loire

Ioane Ioane (Auckland based, born 1962) and Martin Loire (Auckland based, born Buenos Aires, 1976) collaborate across sculpture, installation, poetry, and performance. Ioane’s three decades of mahi across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa draw on Samoan heritage and the generative energies of vā, the relational space of becoming. Loire, a bilingual Argentinian installation artist and poet whose books Mother Tongue and Siesta explore childhood’s emotional architectures, brings a lyrical countercurrent shaped by early fantasies and survival instincts.

Together, they weave material, language, and ritual into works that open connective spaces between cultures, memories, and the shifting thresholds of identity.

Michelle Mayn

Michelle Mayn (b. 1963) lives in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, where she completed a Master of Visual Arts at AUT in 2019. She draws on skills and processes established through study of Māori weaving (Unitec, 2011), wānanga, and mixed media instruction at Art Students League of New York (2016–2017). Her sculpture and installation practice explores ancient textile methods alongside intra-active phenomena.

Site-specific installations include Te Harakeke, situated outdoors for CONTEXTILE – Contemporary Textile Art Biennial, Portugal (2022); Te Harakeke, Te Kōrare, harvested and exhibited for Sculpture in the Garden, Auckland Botanic Gardens (2021–2022); and the 35-metre aerial installation Harakeke Rope, AUT (2019). She exhibits regularly in solo and group shows, including with mothermother artist collective in Unifying Threads, Te Atamira, Tāhuna/Queenstown (2025) and Onepū – shifting sands/shifting time, Franklin Arts Centre, Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland (2025).

Gabby O’Connor

Gabby O’Connor is an artist, transdisciplinary researcher, Antarctican, science communicator, and educator. Her work operates across multiple disciplines and audiences—between contemporary art, science communication, and community action—and looks at different entry points to conversations about terrestrial and marine ecosystems connected to a changing climate. She frequently collaborates with different communities, scientists, other artists, audiences, and primary school-aged students.

O’Connor studied sculpture at VCA in Melbourne (1995), has an MFA from COFA, UNSW (2004), and earned a PhD at UoA (2025) with a social art and social science research project about marine ecosystems in Aotearoa with 8,000 participants and exhibitions across five sites.

Ben Pearce

Ben Pearce completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts majoring in Sculpture at Wanganui Quay School of Fine Arts in 2003. Exhibiting regularly in New Zealand, Pearce has work held in the public collection of the Sargeant Gallery, Whanganui, and in prominent private collections throughout New Zealand, Australia, Germany, the UK, and the USA. He is featured in Warwick Brown’s book Seen this Century, featuring 100 contemporary New Zealand artists.

Pearce’s work has been exhibited at City Gallery Wellington, Te Uru Auckland, Suter Art Gallery Nelson, Tauranga Art Gallery, MTG Hawke’s Bay Napier, and Hastings City Art Gallery. In 2022, he was the inaugural recipient of the $30,000 ARA Art Award in Hawke’s Bay, and in the same year he created Paper Pals Aotearoa — a large-scale four-plinth public commission for the Wellington Sculpture Trust, exhibited in the forecourt of Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington.