Elisabeth Pointon
Elisabeth Pointon lives in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland and holds a BFA (2014) and MFA (2017) from Massey University. An artist of Indo-Fijian and Pākehā descent, Pointon works across sculpture, public intervention, video, and at one point painting, to interrogate systems of influence—political, social, institutional, and commercial—through the slippages within language.
Some of her exhibitions include BIG TIME., Champs, Granville City Art Centre, NSW (2023); Thanks for all the fish., with Christopher Ulutupu, Pātaka Art + Museum (2021); SOMETHING BIG., Tiffany & Co., Auckland Art Fair (2021); WHERE TO FROM HERE, Jhana Millers (2020); BEST WISHES. as part of Uncomfortable Silence, Christchurch Art Gallery (2020); What Goes Up., City Gallery (2019); WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT., play_station (2019); and Special offer., Te Tuhi (2018).
Ngaroma Riley
Ngaroma Riley is an artist and people connector of Te Rarawa, Te Aupōuri, and Pākehā descent. A founder of Te Ana o Hine, a wahine-led carving shed based at Te Tuhi in Tāmaki Makaurau, Ngaroma began her carving journey making Buddhist statues while working in Japan. Since returning to Aotearoa in 2020, she has completed a Certificate in Whakairo at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa.
Ngaroma’s work and research centres on Māori narratives, with a focus on retelling whānau, hapū, and iwi stories through a wahine Māori lens. In 2022, she built a storehouse for a public installation in Kaitaia. She is known for her karetao (hand-carved puppets) and love of chainsaws.
Taarn Scott
Taarn Scott is an artist from Ōtepoti, based in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland. Their practice is multidisciplinary and often collaborative, creating tactile objects informed by ornamentation and jewellery. These explore ideas around habitat, environmental concerns and geographical histories. They are currently researching insect habitats and working with wax, clay and metal.
Scott’s recent projects include Somewhere Between Abundance exhibited in Naarm with West Space and in Ōtepoti with Slant Art Project Space in 2025, a project made possible with the support of CNZ. They exhibited He tuna ora, he wai ora with Hana Pera Aoake at CoCA, Ōtautahi.
Ann Shelton
Ann Shelton identifies as queer. Her work engages questions around the disciplined body and how that discipline plays out through gender, sexuality, reproduction, misogyny, medicine, food, and crime, most recently in relation to plants and their impacts on the body.
Shelton’s work with plant materials is reviewed in Artforum, Hyperallergic, artnet news, and Evergreen Review. She is represented in collections throughout Aotearoa, Australia, and North America. Shelton’s first institutional solo exhibition in the United States, i am an old phenomenon, was presented at Alice Austen House, New York in 2024. Alice Austen House Press also simultaneously published Shelton’s award-winning book worm, root, wort…& bane.
For more than a decade, Ann Shelton has explored the micro, marginal, bleak and traumatic counterhistories of plants through her photographic and performance-based artwork. Linking gender politics and the climate crisis in a critical moment, ‘i am an old phenomenon’ bears even greater significance as she reinvestigates lost knowledge pertaining to plants and their relationship to female ontology through the figure of the witch.
Sally Smith
Sally Smith lives on Waiheke Island. She studied Architecture at Auckland University before running her own practice for many years on Waiheke. This background has informed her art practice which she chose to follow full-time in 2010.
Growing up on Waiheke she has seen the devastating loss to the Gulf’s natural environment with species becoming technically extinct in her lifetime alone. Many of her works seek to highlight this fragility and raise awareness of the need to protect it.
Working in bronze, cast glass and steel her works range from monumental public artworks, through to more delicate wall installations that have no boundaries – just like nature. She exhibits regularly both nationally and globally with representation in NZ, France and the USA. She has exhibited in several Sculpture on the Gulf events.
Evan Woodruffe
For over 25 years, Evan Woodruffe has engaged with colour as a sensation and a material, extending his painting practice into a language that he applies to canvas, clothing, furniture, and even luxury cars. He has grown his audience from Aotearoa New Zealand out into the Asia-Pacific, with significant exhibitions including the 8th Beijing Biennale (2019), Hastings City Art Gallery (2023), and Sydney Contemporary (2024).
Evan uses his deep sense of materials to develop abstract painting history into lively and fascinating passages of pictorial space. These paintings and painted objects are sites for active contemplation, where themes of wonder, joy, and hope are celebrated as an antidote to our everyday pathos.
Evan is based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, and has his MFA (1st Class) from University of Auckland.
