Artists in Residence

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It is with great pleasure to announce the recipient of the Waiheke Community Art Gallery Artist in Residence for 2023 - Wanda Gillespie.

An Australian/New Zealand award -winning contemporary artist Gillespie works primarily with wood to produce fine sculptural works.  You may remember her beautiful Abacus titled A Counting Frame for Circular Economies in Perpetual Guardian Sculpture in the Gulf 2022. 

 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.

‘Over the past decade she has refined her craft as a woodcarver through the creation of evocative portrait sculptures, combining detailed and abstracted, ancient and contemporary form. Familiar objects are reimagined with alternate uses, history, culture, and ceremony. By using traditional craft techniques in contemporary ways, she questions known histories and the nature of reality.’ 

We look froward to Wanda commencing her residency in early May along with a programme of events and workshops. 

If you would like to support the 2023 Artist in Residence Programme and future programmes please click here to enquire -  AIR Support. A downloadable  Patrons support form is available here. You can also contribute to the programme via our Friends, Patrons and Benefactors page here.

Summary and Important Dates: 

The Artist in Residence programme provides an opportunity for an artist to live on Waiheke Island and create a body of work over a period of up to 12-weeks. A barn owned by a local resident has been provided for the artist to work in to create their body of work. The residence provided is separate from the barn. No tools or equipment are provided in the barn. It is anticipated that the residency will suit a painter or sculptor. The works created through the residency should be accessible to a large and primarily New Zealand audience and possibly present a reflection of what is unique about our island environment. It will be important for the artist to interact with the community, specifically through the conducting of two workshops, engagement with Waiheke High School and its arts students and generally taking part in all media interviews, publicity, events and promotion associated with the residency. An online blog is also proposed. The culmination of the residency will see the staging of an exhibition in the Main Gallery of the Waiheke Community Art Gallery ~ Te Whare Taonga O Waiheke.

Our 2021 Artist in Residence was Bronwen Newbury.

While in New Zealand as Waiheke Community Art Gallery’s artist in residence Western Australian artist Bronwen Newbury was announced overall winner of the Cossack Art Award, Western Australia’s richest art prize.

Newbury who comes from Albany (Western Australia), won the award for her work The Golden Hour a landscape painting of the Pilbara region.

Cossack Art Award Judge John Teschendorff said “Newbury’s work, The Golden Hour, is a brilliant Australian landscape in the stylistic reality of renowned Australian artists Arthur Boyd and Fred Williams."  "The work has the same high horizon and a gentle authority over the landscape. Every time you look at the painting you see something different and that’s the story of this landscape.”

“We are very thrilled that Bronwen achieved this award while on her residency on Waiheke,”said Gallery Director Linda Chalmers.

“It’s been a challenging journey for Bronwen to get here and take up the residency 12 months later than scheduled, given last year’s lockdowns, and then for her to adapt to a totally different look of the land.  In place of a flat landscape with high horizons, she has found steep hills and sub-tropical shapes and colours. We very much looked forward to seeing her interpretations of our landscape in the paintings created here on Waiheke.” Visit her exhibition here.

Bronwen Newbury 2021 Artist in Residence