Exhibitions
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The Artist in Residence programme has been run by the Waiheke Community Art Gallery since 2007 with 2025 marking the 10th iteration of this successful biennial event. The programme is made possible through the generous support of our patrons.
Our Artist in Residence Programme is an exciting opportunity for an artist to spend 12 weeks living and creating art on beautiful Waiheke Island. This stunning island is 35 minutes by ferry from Auckland City, surrounded by the azure waters of the Hauraki Gulf. The selected artist will experience the vibrant island art scene that is home to many creatives working across a range of media and approaches. The island provides access to stunning white sandy beaches, native bush walks, iconic restaurants and vineyards.
Living and working in the beautiful and unique island environment, our artists are inspired to develop and expand their practice and create a new body of work for an exhibition at the end of their residency.
Accommodation and a car are provided to the artist as well as the use of nearby Owhanake Barn for a large studio work space.
The programme includes a weekly stipend, as well as materials provided to the value of $1000.
The artist is well supported by the Gallery Director, Fiona Blanchard, Gallery staff and the Artist in Residence team during their stay.
Our passionate and friendly arts community will welcome the artist to the Island with opportunities to engage through workshops, artist’s talks and patron and publicity events.
At the end of the residency, the artist showcases their works in an exhibition at the Waiheke Community Art Gallery.
Call for submissions are now open until 6 December 2024.
Announcing the 2025 Waiheke Community Art Gallery/Te Whare Taonga o Waiheke Artist in Residence. Jody Rallah is announced as the 10th recipient of the Waiheke Community Art Gallery/Te Whare Taonga o Waiheke Artist in Residence programme for 2025.
A yuggera and biri, First Nations Australian artist from Magandjin-Meeanjin/Brisbane, Rallah creates 'knowledge vessels' using various mediums and practices across object making and painting, sculptural installation, facade and thoroughfares, soundscape, and collaborative intergenerational approaches. She creates large-scale and intimate forms to embody living histories and explore an evocative sensibility with material creations, and iconography. Rallah investigates how the aliveness of place is encoded in memory spaces, and how a haptic hands-on approach to art making and design can foster inclusive conversations, by inviting curiosity about relationships with Country, the built environment, and our place within it.
In 2024, Rallah was the third Galang residency recipient based in Paris at the Cité Internationale des Arts as part of the Powerhouse initiative to support Australian-based First Nations creative practitioners. Her project explored the impact of tactile language systems in immersive environments, investigation the Braille systems transformative impact in empowering social change for individuals with vision impairments. She found there were connections between her culture and the Braille system, both linked to tactile language. By engaging with Ancestral creations in museum collections her research highlighted the role of haptic practices in healing, connection, and cultural continuity. Integrating these systems into public artworks, where she actively works. She emphasised their potential to reshape collective experiences and deepen our understanding of place and how these systems facilitate cultural resurgence, foster healing, and support intergenerational knowledge sharing.
In the last few years, the artist has created a series of large-scale clay paintings, culminating in a 22- metre-long performative work at the Museum of Brisbane in 2023. Rallah graduated with a Bachelor's in Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art (CAIA) from the Queensland College of Art - Griffith University in 2019. In 2020 Rallah participated in the Hatched National Graduate Exhibition at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA) as one of twenty-four artists selected Nationwide. In 2021 she held a solo exhibition at Milani Carpark Gallery. Rallah debuted her work Guides in the Brisbane City Centre as a part of the Indigenous Art Program - Outstanding 2022. She has been a panelist for the QLD Museum during the World Science Festival, Apmere Mparntwe - Australian Ceramics Triennial, Australian Ceramics Journal, Sculptors QLD, Women of the World, and more.
Rallah will begin the 12-week residency in late May concluding with an exhibition at the Gallery in August 2025.
Acclaimed New Zealand artist Wanda Gillespie was the ninth Waiheke Community Art Gallery Artist in Residence. Gillespie worked primarily with mathematical curiosities such as the abacus with the emotive human form.
Wanda Gillespie has a Master of Fine Arts by Research with First Class Honours, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne University, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Intermedia), Elam School of Fine Art, The University of Auckland. She has exhibited widely, and her work is held in a number of public and private collections.
View her exhibition online HERE
Western Australian artist Bronwen Newbury used her 12-week residency inspired by the different way light falls on the land and its forms, the vegetation and the views especially the impermanence of the fleeting images.
Working in acrylic, she spent time exploring and experimenting with her paint palette and working at a much bigger scale in the Owhanake Barn studio space.
During the residency she was selected as overall winner of the Western Australian annual Cossack Art Award 2021.
Bronwen has exhibited throughout Australia and has work held in corporate and private collections in Australia and internationally.
Mark is a highly regarded contemporary abstract painter from St. Ives, Cornwall and London and his work is held in private collections in the UK, Europe and the USA.
The paintings that Mark created during his residency were concerned with landscape and how it might be represented in alternative modes of abstraction. Waiheke’s heightened colour, vast skies and elemental weather gave him a new set of visual and cultural reference points using the concept of GPS mapping as a way of understanding the landscape.
View Mark's Artist in Residence short film The Shape of the Walk
Michel, from Wellington, is a New Zealand based artist of Samoan, Rarotongan and Tahitian heritage.
While on Waiheke, Michel explored historic middens and Pah sites, to inform his residency work. Shells found in midden sites and at beach locations were cast in bronze as treasures, to reflect the importance of the DNA and historical detail they hold.
He also drew on the history of the Pacific and connections between Tahiti, the Cook Islands and pre-colonial Aotearoa. Traditional motifs and materials, combined with contemporary references, thread throughout his art. His show of paintings, prints and bronze sculpture works all pointed to the history of Waiheke Island.
A group of nine contemporary artists from Australia led by New Zealand born, Euan MacLeod, spent their two-week residency painting together in a variety of scenic locations across the island. The group have often worked together in the Australian landscape, painting directly from their viewpoints, ‘en plein-air’.
The artists, including Steve Lopes, Elisabeth Cummings, Susan O’Doherty, Peter O’Doherty, Chris O’Doherty (aka Reg Mombassa), Joe Frost, Amanda Penrose Hart and Idris Murphy are all winners of major Australian art prizes including the Archibald Prize, and the Sulman and Gallipoli Art Prizes. Their works are held in major public and private collections internationally.
On Waiheke, they experienced and interpreted the landscape in a different light giving locals a new view of their surroundings from the perspective of nine different interpretations.
Susanne Kerr is a contemporary, award-winning NZ artist from Wellington.
During her residency on the island, she was taken by the sheer abundance of wonderful diverse sculptures on Waiheke, both public and privately installed. In her works, she references these sculptures with a change of scale and space and overlaid them with her distinctive figurative imagery.
She has played with scale and space, drawing the eye over the surface of the work in what is drawn or left untouched, creating tensions between opposites.
Sarah, originally from Auckland, is a gilder, glass painter and ceramicist, and had spent many years living and exhibiting in London, and particularly developing her skills as a gilder.
She focused on her love of landscape and still life using her unique set of skills working largely in the field to create studies and paintings that expressed what is intrinsic to the island landscape and community. She also used her gilding skills to create a map of Waiheke called ‘Gilded Isle’ representing the island as a treasure, a golden place.
Stephen, a jeweller and sculptor, came from Dunedin, and had described himself as ’artist archaeologist’ who excavates the past and relocates it in the present. He researched the history of Waiheke and the Hauraki Gulf, inspired by the book Hauraki Contested 1769-1875 by Paul Monin.
Using antique found objects such as axe handles, bush saws and scythes, and using No.8 wire, he then beautifully crafted new, hybridised forms and identities for them.
Phil, a glass artist, was our inaugural Artist in Residence. He came from Invercargill and was inspired by the island climate and opportunity to make large scale works in the Owhanake Ban studio space.
During his time here he created dramatic glass wall panels and free-standing glass sculptures, including smaller domestic scale bowls and platters using the slump fused glass technique.
The centrepiece for his gallery exhibition was his ’Gates O’ Waiheke’ created during the residency as a metaphor for his reluctance to leave the island.
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