2024 S-Z — MAGS ART SHOW

Mat ScottOriginally from Hawke's Bay, Mat Scott has been creating for most of his life. He has been a painter, photographer, wood carver, metal bender and many other occupations which channel his inventiveness. He enjoys the variety of life and is sure that there are more creative iterations ahead for him. He loves surfing, family, friends and the environments in which he lives and works.

Liz SharekLiz Sharek graduated from Auckland University of Technology with a Master of Art and Design in 2008 and has lived in Matakana for the last eight years. Following her move north, she changed her focus from cast glass to ceramics. Liz’s forms are hand-built vessels which explore texture and surface by working directly with the materiality of the clay and glaze. She is particularly interested in the interface between a controlled outcome and allowing the materials their own voice. Liz has exhibited widely in New Zealand and overseas and her work is represented in a number of public and private collections.

SiLKASiLKA (Simple Living Kiwi Artist) is an oil painter who produces landscape works inspired by Turner and the tonalist movement, as well as expressionist and impressionist-inspired figurative work. Also a musician and therapist, he lives and works in a rural home overlooking the Kaipara Harbour. SiLKA has exhibited in his own right, and his work has been sold to private and corporate buyers in New Zealand and internationally.

Annie Smits SandanoAnnie Smits Sandano has exhibited extensively throughout New Zealand and abroad for over 16 years as a painter, print maker and now also as a ceramicist. Her work has recently become part of the private collection of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. She has been selected as a finalist in the 2019 Portage Ceramic Awards, the Waiheke Small Sculpture Award 2020, the Molly Morpeth Canaday Award 2021, the New Zealand Painting and Printmaking Award 2022 and the Walker and Hall Waiheke Art Award 2022.

Anna StichburyAnna Stichbury’s works are often bold and feature intense hues. Through the use of colour and texture she strives to create rich, vibrant paintings that have an immediate impact for the viewer. She is interested in our emotional response to a work. Anna has been painting and exhibiting for around 20 years and has had many group and solo exhibitions throughout New Zealand and Australia. She paints from her Wellington studio and supplies galleries nationally. Her paintings have been published in a range of New Zealand art calendars, diaries, articles and the book ‘New Zealand’s Favourite Artists’.

Morgan Paige TaitokoMorgan Paige Taitoko

Anna TangAnna Tang’s artwork embodies a sense of beauty and peace, exploring arrangements of urban nature and wild flora. Her everyday surroundings at her Auckland home studio inspire much of her work. Anna’s paint carvings are rich and intricate, featuring lines carefully carved into a thick base of layered acrylic paint. She uses her background in graphic design to create carefully considered and balanced pieces of art, with attention to detail and honed carving. She enjoys the simplicity of working in duotone and exploring what can be achieved with positive and negative space. Her art has a beautiful handmade aesthetic, the surface texture drawing viewers in to explore it up close and from a distance. Anna’s design philosophy is to create tranquil art pieces that can be cherished for years to come.

Shannon TuruwhenuaShannon Turuwhenua

Irina VelmanIrina Velman is a mixed media artist. She has travelled extensively and lived in several different countries. Irina has settled in the Waitakeres, but has a strong sense that her journey is continuing. There is always another distant shore, another chapter, another unknown layer of reality to be discovered. Her art embraces travel and transformation, expressed through seascapes and land patterns. Mixing acrylic paint with different polymers, pigments and resin, Irina creates unique textures and authentically down to earth work.

Michelle ViskovichMichelle Viskovich’s art has been 24 years in its development. Originally from Waitākere in Tāmaki Makaurau, she spent a lot of her youth at Piha. She is inspired by the natural environment around her and paints landscapes to capture the vibrancy and luminosity of reflections, combining abstract techniques with realism. Her work involves subtle mark making with palette knives to manipulate the paint into a coherent composition. She practises locally with the Platina Street Art Group in Auckland.

Makayla VercoeMakayla Vercoe

Kirsty WhiteWellington-based printmaker Kirsty White grew up on a remote farm in the bush-clad hills of the Wairarapa which gave her a love for our landscape. Now living on the south coast, she enjoys translating her passion for landscape using texture and minimal tone through the printmaking process. Her current artwork focuses on our native bush, our treasures of the forest, nga taonga o te ngahere. The use of pattern work within her landscapes has been inspired by Pacific Island masi and tapa cloth as well as Māori whakairo. Pattern allows her to add narrative to her work, referencing our place here in the Pacific and layering details that reflect on past and present habitation.

Cara WildeCara Wilde is an Auckland-based artist. Her subjects include landscapes, florals, native bird life and her unique, well-known depictions of historic towns and cottages, which can range from a majestic native tūī, to a place she has visited or a beautiful floral piece. Using a vibrant palette, Cara consciously focuses on the beauty and essence of nature. She paints what she is passionate about at that time and aims to convey feelings of calm or tranquillity on the canvas. Over the past nine years, Cara has exhibited her work at many local shows and exhibitions.

Mele Siniva Williams Siniva Williams is a multidisciplinary artist of Māori (Ngā Puhi and Raukawa), Tongan, Samoan, and English heritage. Siniva's blend of cultural influences allows her to create art that is both visually stunning and deeply meaningful. Her work is a reflection of her deep connection to her roots and her desire to preserve the stories and traditions of her ancestors. Through her art, she aims to create a bridge between past and present, using the whakataukī “Ka mua, ka muri” (Walking backwards into the future), conveying a sense of reverence for what has come before.

Heather Wilson Heather Wilson draws inspiration from her memories of a happy, carefree Kiwi childhood. Her contemporary artworks also explore aspects of iconic New Zealand scenery and symbolism, connected with cherished geometric patterns from the 1970s. Heather describes her work as an explosion of bold, strong colour and texture, which is her distinctive trademark. She uses acrylic and mixed media on canvas and board with resin effects.

Evan WoodruffeEvan Woodruffe is a Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland-based artist. He exhibits throughout the Asia-Pacific region, with work in significant collections in Singapore, Australia, China, the USA and New Zealand. Writer Lucinda Bennett referred to his works as Wet Maps, “living, breathing ecosystems, and visualisations of a new kind of urbanism”. Evan has a Master of Fine Arts (1st Class) from Elam School of Fine Arts. An advocate for the visual arts, he runs Akepiro Street Studios and is a respected educator. He has recently exhibited at the 8th Beijing Biennale and Hastings City Art Gallery.

Clare WoodsClare Woods is an intuitive abstract artist based in Matakana and Torbay. She has always painted and has vivid memories of painting bright colours and patterns over her walls and windows as a child. This creative freedom led to art studies and a successful design career. Having explored mediums such as clay, printing and fibre art, she now mostly paints in acrylics on canvas, often incorporating pencil, crayon or pastel in her mark making, and is exploring collage. Often inspired by nature, Clare creates hundreds of hand-painted and cut swatches filled with intense colour which connect and overlap. Each section is unique, while blending and relating to the others like a family, each telling its own story and intended to elicit a happy, uplifting response. An underlying narrative is formed with complex layering, mark making and thick, experimental tool paint application. Similar marks and shapes reappear in her work and comprise a unique signature style, a fingerprint of pools, lines, paths and pattern. Clare's work is joyful, colourful and vibrant.

Coral Noel YangAuckland-based, Taiwanese-born Coral Noel Yang is a contemporary painter. Her current collection references water, aquatic plants and atmosphere with recurring motifs of lily pads, fireflies and jasmine blooms drawn from misty childhood memories. Blending the soak-stain method with the Asian tradition of water ink, her paintings are rich in colour, depth, layering, luminosity and watermarks, evoking a sense of time and space, wonder and belonging. She attributes her interest in art to learning calligraphy growing up and splashing pigments onto thin rice paper with her artist mother, as well as her 15 years living and working as a filmmaker and animation director, from Hollywood to China.

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