The curiosity of creatives in residence

Kites, drones, public toilets, social housing, and whakapapa are among the topics to be explored by four artists while living at Te Matatiki Toi Ora The Arts Centre.

The Arts Centre welcomes four new creative residents for ten weeks, 19 August – 27 October.

They are: David Cook, Emily Hartley-Skudder, Te Rautini Sheridan, and Harete Tito.

The four will stay in the Creative Residences, a four-bedroom apartment above Lumière Cinemas on the west side of The Arts Centre.

The Arts Centre creative residency programme is a rare opportunity for artists to develop their own work free of distractions and builds collaboration across creative disciplines. For the public, every residency includes opportunities to engage with the artists.

Visual Artist Emily Hartley-Skudder says she is looking forward to returning to the city where she studied fine arts. Of The Arts Centre she says, “this wonderful place is one of my very first memories of the city.” Hartley-Skudder’s art practice often involves installations. These play with distinctions between public and private space, and the meaning attached to objects used for cleaning and personal grooming. Look out for intriguing responses to the public bathrooms dotted around The Arts Centre.

Photographer David Cook, by contrast, plans to go outside The Arts Centre and work with communities in social housing in the city. Cook recently finished a collaboration called Ko te Reo ō Ngā Tāngata/The People’s Voice, in which he worked with thirty Wellington City Housing tenants to co-create a street exhibition and newspaper. Cook is also a co-founder of Photobook NZ, which hosts a biennial photobook festival with Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand.

Artist Harete Tito’s specialities include making paper from native rākau, notably harakeke, a skill that she hopes to share with other artists during her residency. Amongst other things, Tito creates limited edition art books. Tito’s residency project will explore whakapapa, beginning with the birth of her kuia Araiteuru, born in Ōtautahi in 1906 during the New Zealand exhibition, and whose father was one of the carvers for the exhibition.

Artist Te Rautini Sheridan, meanwhile, hopes to create ‘manu matatopa’ or fusions of the traditional manu tukutuku (kites) and contemporary drones. Sheridan plans to use natural resources such as kākaho, raupō, muka, and harakeke paper, while also deploying modern technologies, and looks forward to sharing the results with the public.

The Creative Residency programme for artists is funded by Creative New Zealand.

More about the artists

Wellington-based photographer David Cook is originally from Christchurch. His long-term multi-media engagements deal with subjects as diverse as coal mining and state housing communities. In 2013 his socially engaged approach led him to work on ‘The Freeville Project’, in which he and Tim Veling co-created a public artwork with school children from New Brighton, expressing their visions for the future of their post-earthquake whenua. David’s book Meet Me in the Square: Christchurch 1983-1987 was launched in 2014, accompanied by an exhibition at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū. The book and show reconstructed a 1980s version of the city through his archive of photographs and stories. In his latest project, ‘Ko te Reo ō Ngā Tāngata / The People’s Voice’ (2023), he joined Mark Amery, Anna Brown and thirty tenants of Wellington City Housing to co-create a street exhibition and newspaper. This work presented an insiders’ counter-narrative to the one-dimensional portrayal of city housing issues. David is the author and editor of numerous photobooks. He is a senior lecturer at Whiti o Rehua School of Art, Massey University in Wellington. David is a co-founder of Photobook NZ, a collective who have been hosting biennial photobook festivals with Te Papa since 2016.

Emily Hartley-Skudder (b. 1988, Tāmaki Makaurau, Pākehā) is a visual artist known for her paintings, assemblages and site-specific installations which delve into the artificial ordinary and faux domestic. She is based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, having recently returned from Ōtepoti after completing the 2023 Frances Hodgkins Fellowship. Emily graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (First Class Honours) from Ilam School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury in 2012. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout Aotearoa and internationally, including at several Ōtautahi and Te Whanganui-a-Tara galleries, Gus Fisher Gallery, Hastings City Art Gallery, The Suter Art Gallery, and Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Emily has participated in shows in Sendai, Japan; Mandurah and Melbourne, Australia; Xiamen, China; Austin, Texas, and multiple exhibitions in New York City, USA. She is represented by Jhana Millers Gallery, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, and Jonathan Smart Gallery, Ōtautahi.

Harete Tito (Tūhourangi - Ngāti Wāhiao, Ngāti Pikiao, Taranaki whānui, Te Whānau a Apanui, Scottish, Irish) is a full time Māori artist (19 years) whose work has featured at home in Aotearoa and overseas including in Turkey, Colombia, Brazil, USA, Indonesia, Canada, and Australia. Her creative work is a collaboration with nature and her ongoing project: Whenua (Earth), Wai (Water), Ao Mārama (Light), Kohatu (Stone) is a gathering of nature to share stories of connection that speak for the environment and for humanity.

Harete began her creative journey 30 years ago at Waiariki Polytechnic in Rotorua where she grew up. It was here that she learnt the art of harakeke paper making. During this time, she also discovered her love of photography which has become a tool for connecting to nature, learning through observation over time and inspiration for the works she creates.

In 2022 she exhibited Rākau, an exhibition supported by Creative NZ to research, create and share a body of work that used 100% native trees for paper (harakeke) and colour.

She is currently using native rākau as a form of reclamation, sharing mātauranga Māori and personal stories, and ensuring a sustainable creative practice where at any time, the entire work can be returned to the earth. As an artist, her main focus now is creating limited edition art books from 100% native trees and books that combine her nature photography with her creative nature writing. She is also passionate about helping other artists and has a couple of new projects on the horizon to help artists on their creative journeys.

Te Rautini Sheridan (Ngāti Rangi, Te Atihaunui-a-Pāpārangi, Ngā Rauru, Taranaki) finds great solace in making and creating.

“This allows me space to think, and problem solve,” says Sheridan. “I find these challenges exciting and somewhat addictive; the greater the challenge, the greater the high. Having a strong connection to my Māori heritage gives me access to much of our historical narratives that I love including in my creations. Having attended the 3 Year Te Wananga o Aotearoa whakairo course in 2009, after completing the Diploma in Creativity with The Learning Connexion, I launched myself into life as fulltime artist. This was a far cry from teaching and early business, but I find these disciplines align well allowing me to merge the three. Times are challenging for us all, and for artists this is no exception so to be accepted onto this residency at Te Matatiki Toi Ora The Arts Centre is a huge honour that I am truly grateful for. I look forward to experimenting with found and harvested materials, and upcycling materials to produce maquettes of the traditional manu tukutuku, traditional Māori kites. I’m keen to infuse this with the modern drone our skies are littered with. The idea of using used or found objects appeals to my sense of responsibility to the environment.”