Ms.Interpreted

Surface-level observations only.

(Just kidding. Have we met?)

If you know Sefton Rani’s work, you’ll know that nothing about it is ever surface-level. For an artist so deeply invested in materiality, surfaces carry labour, whakapapa, transformation, and the traces of memory. They ask us to question first impressions, and remember that “surface-level” is often just another way of admitting we haven’t looked closely enough.

Clear My Throat has been a long time coming. It’s been a privilege to work alongside Sefton through this process, not only as curator and artist, but as friends who have spent countless hours talking through ideas. Watching this exhibition gradually find its form has been one of the most rewarding curatorial experiences I’ve had.

Now it’s finally coming together, and I can’t wait to share it with you. ✨

Join us for the opening of Clear My Throat
Wednesday 20 August, 6.00–7.30pm
Arts House Trust | Pah Homestead

As this year’s Guest Curator, I’m incredibly grateful to the The Arts House Trust team, especially Anita_Tótha and Nicholas, for believing in this exhibition and supporting the vision from the very beginning. It’s been an absolute joy to bring this project to life together.

See you in a couple of weeks. 🖤🖤🖤

One of the unexpected joys of Direct Bodily Empathy: Sound, Signal, Feedback at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre was encountering Yuko Mohri’s work again. The first time I experienced Mohri’s practice was at the Japanese Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. It was one of the standout presentations for me.

For Decomposition, Mohri assembles an unlikely community of collaborators: fruit, microphones, speakers, amplifiers, electronic circuitry and light. As the fruit slowly ferments and decomposes, its changing conductivity modulates sound and light, allowing microbial life itself to perform the work. What I find so compelling is the way the artist relinquishes authorship. The work can never be fully controlled because it is continually activated by bacteria, fungi, moisture, temperature and time. While Mohri establishes the conditions, decomposition becomes the true composer.

For the Japanese Pavilion in Venice, Yuko MOHRI 毛利悠子 used the pavilion as an active studio, sourcing fruit locally throughout the exhibition rather than transporting materials from Japan. Decomposition in New Plymouth also uses local fruit so that each iteration emerges from its own ecological context. The work is always site-responsive, shaped by the living systems surrounding it.

I couldn’t help thinking about Donna Haraway’s invitation to “make kin, not babies” and her proposition that we are compost rather than posthuman. The sculpture asks us to recognise decomposition as relation: a continual negotiation between human intention and more-than-human agency. It’s a beautiful reminder that some of the most meaningful forms of creativity emerge through collaboration with the living world.

It’s been over a month since I experienced Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Walled Unwalled as part of Direct Bodily Empathy: Sound, Signal, Feedback, curated by Anna Briers at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre. I think about it a lot.

Performed inside the former East German state broadcasting studios in Berlin, the film unfolds as a mesmerising monologue in which glass walls, reflections and layered transparencies blur the boundaries between inside and outside, listener and witness.

It centres on Saydnaya Prison in Syria, where prisoners were blindfolded, kept in darkness and often forbidden to speak. Deprived of sight, they learned to navigate the prison through sound alone. Working with Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture, Lawrence Abu Hamdan drew on survivors’ auditory memories (the echo of footsteps, the reverberation of metal doors, voices travelling through corridors) to help reconstruct the prison’s architecture. He then connects this investigation to cases ranging from thermal imaging through domestic walls to the Oscar Pistorius trial, asking a simple question: can walls ever really keep sound in, or truth out?

What has stayed with me most is the proposition that listening is never passive. It can be forensic. It can become evidence. It can expose hidden architectures of power.

Oscar Wilde wrote: “all art is quite useless.”

I think he meant it doesn’t tell us what to do.

Tracey Emin’s A Second Life at Tate puts a body in the room.

Her body. Ours.

I kept thinking about My Bed. The work everyone knows… or they think they know. Walking into the reconstruction of her studio I realised the bed was never just a bed. It’s the room. The clothes on the floor. The cigarette packets. The books. The drawings pinned to the wall. Half-finished thoughts. Half-lived days. The evidence of someone trying to survive themselves.

It felt strangely familiar.

Not because my room has ever looked like Emin’s, but because, at some point, life has probably come that close to all of us. Grief. Depression. Obsession. Love. Illness. S*x. Those moments when the boundaries between sleeping, making, hiding, fu***ng, crying, reading, recovering and simply existing dissolve into the same square metres.

Forty years of dragging the self like an open wound. The autobiography of making ordinary catastrophe of being … so public.

Just feeling. Raw, relentless feeling. The kind that gets under your skin before your brain has a chance to name it.

Maybe that’s what art is for… to leave us a little less able to look away from ourselves.

Such a buzz to see this show in May this year. Absolute highlight x ♥️♥️♥️♥️

I was absolutely stoked to be commissioned by Ramp Gallery to write the exhibition essay for Ash and Aperture, the beautiful collaborative exhibition by David Austin Aotearoa and Mark Hamilton . It was also such a pleasure to be there for the opening and experience the work in person.

The more time I spent thinking about their practice, the more I realised this isn’t simply a show about ceramics and photography. At its heart, it’s about friendship, about trust, generosity, vulnerability and what becomes possible when creativity is shaped through relationship rather than individual achievement.

One passage from the essay feels like it gets to the heart of it:

“Friendship is not simply the condition that makes collaboration possible; it is itself a creative practice. It asks us to relinquish certainty without relinquishing ourselves, to trust without guarantees, and to remain open to transformation. In a culture that continues to celebrate individual achievement and singular authorship, Austin and Hamilton remind us that our richest work often emerges through relationships that refuse ownership and hierarchy.”

A huge thank you to Dave and Mark for trusting me with your work, and to the team at RAMP Gallery for the invitation to contribute. It was a genuine pleasure.

If you’re anywhere near Kirikiriroa Hamilton, go and spend some time with this exhibition. It’s generous, thoughtful and moving. ✨✨✨

Last night SANDERSON turned into a fire hazard! I have genuinely not been to an opening that packed in a long time.

Came to support mothermother . Left with too many hugs and unfinished conversations!

The show is brilliant. Funny, sharp, generous, strange, and emotional all at once. Go see it. Seriously.

Huge congratulations to nat tozer , Michelle Reid and Lydia Cowpertwait for pulling it off!

Special award goes to nat tozer , serving full Mother Superior realness. No notes. Outfit of the night. Canonised immediately. 🙏🏼

An absolute buzz from start to finish. If you missed the opening… condolences. You’ll just have to settle for seeing the exhibition without 400 people standing between you and the art.
♥️♥️♥️♥️

Pat and Gil Hanly’s home still feels very much alive: Gil’s studio remains as though she has just stepped out, shelves overflow with books and ceramics, paintings and photographs sit in conversation with one another, and outside the garden unfolds around sculptures, including Chris Booth’s beautiful stacked stone work… and a bit John Edgar too. It’s impossible not to imagine the extraordinary creative life that grew here.

The vision for Hanly House is to preserve it as a place where people can experience this remarkable home, while also giving it a future as a residency where artists (and perhaps even a family) can once again live, make, and create within its walls. It feels like the most fitting continuation of the couple’s remarcable legacy.

This visit was unexpectedly emotional for me. Before museums and curating, I studied neuroscience. My master’s research was the world’s first proteomics study of the Huntington’s disease brain, a paper born out of a thesis that, decades later, still finds its way into new research. Huntington’s disease was also the illness that shaped the final years of Pat Hanly’s life. It’s rare that the worlds of art and neuroscience meet so directly.

Thank you Diane Blomfield for inviting me to visit and our kōrero x

Visit the Hanly House website and consider supporting the project, by purchasing one of the limited-edition ceramic bricks created by Peter Lange (a longtime friend of Pat and Gil). https://hanlyhouse.nz 💛🧡💛💙

Only a few days remain to see Iridescent Reflections at bowengalleries .

Writing the commissioned essay that accompanies Gregor Kregar’s exhibition was a rare opportunity to think through our shared migrant histories while returning to the work of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. It became an essay about clouds, contradiction, and why art matters in moments of uncertainty.

Here’s an excerpt that feels especially resonant right now:

“We are living through uncertain economic and social conditions, where life is often described in terms of exhaustion. [...] The remedy for this condition may be found in beauty and poetics, which can hold what politics alone often struggles to sustain: contradiction and the unresolved. [...] They open a space in which the future can be reimagined, including whatever it is that we continue to look for in the clouds. Clouds invite us into a form of collective imagining, where visions of the world can become shared and contagious.[...] In the end, they are among the oldest and most democratic of phenomena: something everyone shares, and no one owns.”

“And here we come to the function of art. People are drawn to it and continue to be, because it generates a visceral and curious energy that resists easy explanation. It is precisely this relational asymmetry that makes Gregor Kregar an artist for these unsettled times.” Dina jezdić

Four days in the Coromandel. Winter at its absolute best.

Crisp blue skies. Cold ocean swims. Hahei, Cathedral Cove and Hot Water Beach. Freshest fish, long dinners, beautiful company … total luxury of easy living and abundance of time.

No emails. Barely any internet. Just sun on skin, salt in our hair. Great reminded of how good it feels to disappear for a while.

Perfect way to enjoy Matariki. More of this✨

During Matariki, we are invited to remember those who have gone before us while also looking towards the year ahead. It is a time that reminds us that endings and beginnings are never separate … they exist within the same cycle.

I’ve been thinking about two installations I experienced this year that, despite emerging from vastly different Indigenous worlds, left me with remarkably similar feelings.

At the Barbican Centre , Delcy Morelos’s origo invited visitors to walk through a monumental landscape of soil, clay and fragrant spices, drawing on ancestral Andean and Amazonian knowledge. Unfolding as living architecture, and the environment made out of darkness, scent and earthen walls creating an almost primordial sense of returning to the origins of life itself.

A couple of months ago at Gow Langsford , Brett Graham’s Doorway to Night offered a similarly immersive encounter. Constructed from tī kōuka, the whare functions as memorial and poroporoaki to his parents and senior Māori artists whose guidance shaped his practice. It is a space of remembrance and aroha, holding grief while honouring whakapapa and those who came before.

The works are profoundly different in their cultural foundations, yet both asks us to move through with our bodies as much as our minds. It is about carrying those who came before us into the future. In honouring what has been, we prepare the ground for what is yet to come.

🖤 Mānawatia a Matariki 🖤