Selected pieces. Awards.
NZPPA finalist 2026
... not in any particular order...
Diorama of Extinct Birds of NZ
Merit Award NZPPA 2010
This bird diorama reflects on personal memory and cultural historical contexts.
It is reminiscent of nineteenth century display cabinets of trophy birds, shot in large numbers in the name of 'preservation'. The 'skins' were prized by naturalists and private collectors at that time. I have used images of the former New Zealand bank note birds. As these notes are no longer in currency, and so the birds are 'extinct'.
Using cardboard is a reference to the constructed nature of the early dioramas and the artist's childhood memories; school project cardboard shoe box dioramas and the wonders of the nature study table.
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Finalist and Merit Award Winner
NZ Painting and Printmaking Awards 2010
Click on image for full update (2024 diorama paintings) and statement.
Paper Boat
Estuary Art and Ecology Award 2022 Finalist
A paper boat at sea conveys fragility, vulnerability and is here a symbol of the care needed to restore the Tamaki Estuary. Material and digital methods enable a vision of this restoration.
Navigation chart NZ532 anchors the artwork in local waters with the Tamaki River at the centre of the boat, conveying a sense of place, turangawaewae; a shared responsibility. This is our place, we are kaitiaki.
The boat sails an unsettled sea topped with white horses, white caps of windswept waves. All is not well. A red flag signals warning, danger ahead. Hic sunt dracones! (Here be dragons!) My own dracones, the Dolfish* signifies the unfamiliar and what we may find there.
Alongside the Dolfish, the hull interior is dense with diatoms and fish- an ark.
An additional AR video layer ** transforms the frame of the work, resembling a preserved artefact, to a tank full of life, fish and abundance.
AR allows co-existent realities viewed simultaneously, showing what we are missing and what could come again.
The Dawn Chorus
Academy Prize for Visual Art, Wellington, 2025
Interest in tui dialects inspired this diorama contemplating the dawn chorus as fragile taonga, and our relationship with the natural world. Joseph Banks heard birdsong/dawn chorus, Charlotte Sound, as “the most melodious wild musick” yet the diorama is reminiscent of C19th display cabinets of trophy birdskins, shot for ‘preservation’. Here birds made of drawn spectrograms (visual representations of sound) are mute, except for the recorded dawn chorus (QR code) implying a world where this, only heard in museums, becomes artefact. Composition and materials chosen reference the constructed nature of traditional natural history collections.
Uncharted Waters
NZPPA 2018 finalist
Marine charts record the explored, known world, reassuring us we know where we’re going. However, with warming, acidifying oceans we are heading in to uncharted waters, where calcium carbonate shells are wasting away. Hic sunt dracones! Heading toward my Dolfish, animated through Augmented Reality, representing the strange and unfamiliar and what we may discover there.
Spode Tattoo- Hanging Kowhai
Waiheke Walker and Hall Art Award finalist 2015
This artwork reflects on family, generations and the process of becoming; on what we pass on knowingly or unwittingly.
I am developing my own ‘herbarium’ of native NZ plants, such as this kowhai taken from my late father’s garden, photographed to be ‘scientifically’ documented, and tattooed with china patterns from my female ancestors
Spode Tattoo
NZPPA finalist 2014
Waiheke Small Sculpture Showcase 2019
Relic. Festina Lente.
