Studio Insights - September 2025
CREATE: What I’ve created/done & what I’m working on.
INSPIRE: What art has inspired me.
LEARN: What I’m learning to develop my practice.
PLAN: What I’m planning next.
After many months alluding to my solo show and work in the background, I’m excited to release the first official announcement and dates of my exhibition, The Castle in the Sky.
It will be held at the beautiful Te Auaha in Wellington, marking the final ever exhibition before this venue closes permanently. It’s bittersweet but quite an honour to be the final chapter of such an important creative space.
This project has been years in the making, from dreaming to creating. It presents a whole new body of work and design collaboration with several creatives to bring my vision to life.
“If you understand your painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.”
This month I continued my battle against my large hero painting and thankfully emerged victorious! I spent the rest of the month switching over into design/prep mode.
Table of Contents:
CREATE: Finished Painting
INSPIRE: Petal & Threads
LEARN: Gaming Industry
PLAN: Logo Design
CREATE: Finished Painting
About halfway through the month, I finally finished my large painting for my upcoming solo show. I really struggled with pushing through to the end of this one, finding the complexity of the piece quite daunting. I think the hard work paid off, though, and I’m super excited to reveal this to you all in November! Although I’d say it’s the longest I’ve ever spent on a piece, a huge chunk of that time went into the planning, ideation and sketching stages with much less on actual painting of the final piece. It’s been quite a different process compared to my previous ‘epic’ Ethereal Moss, which didn’t have nearly as much development beyond the photo reference and was more about pure execution. This new piece took a lot more figuring out and was a lot harder to picture how I wanted it to turn out.
INSPIRE: Petal & Threads
I’ve been in quite a slow period lately in terms of visiting exhibitions. I guess I’m just too focused on my own exhibition - I’ve only been going to ones I come across by chance rather than seeking them out and planning like I usually would. However, I always try to make sure to visit at least one a month!
Petal & Threads, Te Auaha
I quite enjoyed this exhibition all about embroidery - nice to see something a bit different that’s not typically displayed in a gallery. I really love this style of comparing one artist’s work and another’s interpretation (think back to Paul Maseyk: Jugs in New Zealand Painting), it’s always so fun and engaging to see how it has been changed. It’s also great to see how different groups make use of the exhibition space given I’ll be using it for my own soon!
LEARN: Gaming Industry
On the surface, this is mostly unrelated to my art practice, but hear me out…
For as long as I can remember, I have been an avid lover of gaming - first on console (PS2 is my childhood) and then primarily PC. About 4 years ago, I moved to a smaller room and decided to permanently setup my desktop PC in my studio. I went a couple of years with no gaming setup and had a bit of an identity crisis - somehow forgetting how much I love games - before coming to my senses and buying a switch. Then most recently, I got an old broken PC from my friend and finally had room for a home desk again. I’ve spent most of my free time over the past month tinkering away, fixing the computer and putting together my setup, and having an absolute blast doing it. I’ve been completely re-immersing myself into the world of gaming, and I feel like a part of me has been fully found again.
Now all this is to say it’s got me thinking a lot more about how all this could relate to my future creative endeavours. I’ve been thinking for a while now that perhaps I would really enjoy delving into the game development industry. Whether that is a job working on games, creating the art or even having a play at making my own thing - I’m not sure. It’s something I’ve never really tried beyond some very simple playing around with software in school. But the idea of applying my own creative vision into a game sounds like a lot of fun, and something I’m keen to explore!
If any of you reading have experience in the gaming industry - I’d love to hear your thoughts on it all. Experiences, recommendations, stories - whatever you’ve got, I’m just curious. It’s a bit of an unknown to me... I really just play the games, not make them.
PLAN: Logo Design
October is going to be hectic busy as my exhibition date looms closer! We’ve been working away on the designs for the exhibition - the next main task is figuring out a logo design and creating the poster. Lots of collaboration in this stage, and we’ve created some super fun designs already which I’m excited to share! And I guess I'd better dust off the ol’ Instagram login to promote the event… I gave it a big break after posting every day for the 30 studies challenge.