I touch the surface, we draw wild beauty

Sena Park, I touch the surface, we draw wild beauty, 2025.

Sena Park, I touch the surface, we draw wild beauty, 2025.

upcoming
31 Jan – 14 Mar

Sena Park

Sena Park’s practice explores the evolving relationship between human-designed environments and natural ecosystems, two poles held in particular tension within domestic gardens. Encompassing installation, expanded forms of painting, sculpture, photography and moving image, I touch the surface, we draw wild beauty reflects upon human endeavours to define or transform the wildness of nature in these private spaces. The works in this exhibition take inspiration from the artist’s observations of her surroundings and everyday realities across differing locations, including Tāmaki Makaurau and Paihia in Aotearoa, as well as her travels to Mongolia and Japan. Unstretched canvases are hung from steel frames, crafting a series of framed views within the gallery space. Synthetic fabrics and sculptural objects are juxtaposed with tree branches and other plant matter, and presented alongside two photographs of the various gardens encountered by the artist. The exhibition also includes Park’s first work in moving image, in which a clip of a lawn being mowed—that suburban ritual—is repeated to the point of absurdity, rendering futile its attempt at control. With both humour and attention to materials, Park highlights our relationship with and impact upon te taiao, while also celebrating its adaptability and resilience.

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Sena Park is a Korean-born New Zealand artist working across painting, mixed media, and installation. Her practice is grounded in analogue, labor-intensive processes and has recently expanded to include sensory media. 

Park’s work often begins with familiar subjects drawn from surrounding nature, architectural and cultural environments, which she reconfigures into non-functional and deliberately imperfect forms in her installations. Her nomadic studio life shapes the materials, forms, and scale of her work. 

Park completed an MFA from Elam in 2015. She has since undertaken residencies in Mongolia, Thailand, China, Japan, and New Zealand.

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of forests and concrete

Matt Tini, of forests and concrete, 2025.

Matt Tini, of forests and concrete, 2025.

upcoming
31 Jan – 14 Mar

Matt Tini

of forests and concrete is an exhibition of new work by Matt Tini developed from his ongoing research into harakeke as both resonant material and a ground for image-making. Using harakeke harvested from the whenua around Kuku as well as Pukeahu in inner-city Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Tini first processes the flax fibres to make paper, then uses extracts from the crushed plants to create a light-sensitive surface on which to expose photographic images. The resulting works are anthotypes, a historic method of image-making that uses pigments developed from plant material with the light of Tamanuiterā. Though paper making is not a customary practice in te ao Māori, Tini draws upon existing mātauranga and tikanga, alongside material experimentation and research, to expand its possibilities as a medium. Through a reciprocal exploration of his own whakapapa and that of harakeke, Tini works with this traditional material as a site of knowledge transmission and exchange. Notably, the images he produces are self portraits—a collaboration between himself and te taiao—and, in turn, a reflection on the lived realities of urban Māori and the complexities of the contemporary relationship to whenua.

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Matt Tini (Waikato, Ngaati Tiipa, Ngaati Mahuta, Ngāti Rākaipaaka, Ngāti Kahungunu)

Matt Tini is an artist and educator who works with photography, moving image, and native fibres. Deeply grounded in whakapapa, Māori cosmologies, and contemporary lived experiences, Tini’s practice considers what it means to be tangata whenua in relation with and through te taiao. These ever-shifting reflections influence Tini’s material and conceptual curiosities.

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