→ Ioane Ioane
Ioane is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau whose work speaks to tradition at its core through performance, film, painting, installation, and sculpture. As a Sāmoan artist, there is a spiritual and transitional nature of va in Ioane’s practice (‘space between’ translated from Sāmoan into English). Va is seen as a place of transformation to birth and becoming. He considers a sacred space to be where one likes to be in and of a place of affirmation. Ioane Ioane wove the connections between movement, well-being, performance and rugby together. By teaching rugby drills to students, young people were able to explore their own performance in a unique way.
→ Emily Parr
Emily Parr (Ngāi Te Rangi, Moana, Pākehā) is an artist living in Tāmaki Makaurau. Emily’s moving image works weave space and time together. Exploring systems of relation from Moananui-a-Kiwa, her recent works explore settler-indigenous relationships over oceans and centuries. Drawing from archival materials, her homelands of Tauranga Moana, Sāmoa and Tonga, Emily shares the responsibility of her ancestral legacies and her family’s connection to taonga and measina. In workshops, Emily explored whakapapa and layering with analogue and digital collage techniques using each students familial archival material.
→ Natasha Matila-Smith
Natasha Matila-Smith (Sāmoan, Māori, Pākehā) is a contemporary arts practitioner whose work explores confessional text-based displays. Her banners cover a range of themes from loneliness, discomfort, the internet and larger social and economic structures. Her specialty is “sad girl confessional” art and finding humour in moments of awkwardness. Students had an opportunity to create their own text-based painting or drawing. Each student created their own sentence to use drawn from lyrics, movie quotes, pop-culture, confessions, thoughts and observations.
→ Numa MacKenzie
As an artist in Tāmaki Makaurau, Numa’s work reflects building connections to his identity, Pacific heritage, and people. His practice explores various mediums from tatau, printmaking, painting and spoken word to voyaging/navigating and street art. With a rich experience of moving to the Cook Islands, Numa’s work taps into his familial ties and cultural forms of artistic practice including tapa, tatau and voyaging. Numa taught students to consider design and arrange woodblock prints. The relief prints were places on tote bags in which the students got to keep. The themes within Numa’s work were explored in the woodblock prints.
→ Benjamin Work
Benjamin Work (Ha’a Lātūhifo, Shetland, Ayr) is an artist born in East Auckland, Benjamin’s work explores his connection to his Tongan and Scottish heritage. He shares the complexities of American subcultures and Moana Oceania diaspora. His Tongan iconography is a food to share cultural treasures such as ‘akau tau (war clubs) telling a wider visual story about his culture (within an institutional framework and on the streets). Benjamin will teach young people to explore symbols, semiotics and iconography to create and paint a flag that represents who they are. Their values, culture and personality will all be introduced into the design of each piece.