Creative Practice

What did my poppa's backyard garden and dressmaking teach me about governance?

A recent Executive MBA assignment for my governance paper, lead by Chris Gallavin. Governance is a big piece of my decision to go back to uni, and the learnings and challenges have been rich!

"My grandparents taught me to care for the natural world through the rhythms of a productive garden, where soil required tending, plants could not be hurried, and future harvests depended upon choices made long before they became visible. My early experience of textiles and garment construction taught similar lessons, that quality emerged through patience, careful attention, and respect for materials, craftsmanship, and process. In both, I learned that shortcuts rarely endure."

Read on for my reflection on what stewardship practices distinguish the people I admire, and how can I grow in these areas?

Leena Nair and Rachel Carson exemplify stewardship in markedly different contexts, each working in conditions of significant complexity and uncertainty. As CEO of Chanel, Nair leads one of the world’s most influential luxury houses, balancing commercial performance with custodianship of living traditions of craftsmanship, culture, heritage, global supply chains, sustainability, and diverse stakeholder expectations. Carson, by contrast, worked outside formal organisational authority, navigating uncertainty while challenging powerful industries, government agencies, and prevailing public narratives. In both cases, their leadership required judgement in situations where evidence was incomplete, trade-offs were unavoidable and the consequences extended far beyond immediate decisions. Together, they illuminate complementary dimensions of stewardship and provide the framework through which I examine my own emerging governance practice.

https://mycreativepractice.substack.com/p/governance-as-stewardship

Massey University - Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa

Are you following my Executive MBA journey? I integrate my Creative Practice into my strategy and leadership work.

My cohort has just had the most amazing and full on Study Tour - a week in São Paulo.

I’ve just published a new reflective essay on my experience in São Paulo during our EMBA study tour.

I found myself thinking about the city through ideas of porousness, entanglement, texture, infrastructure, ecology, emergence, and systems. São Paulo felt less like a fixed structure and more like a living palimpsest: continually rewritten through construction, decay, adaptation, vegetation, movement, and human inscription.

The piece sits somewhere between creative reflection, systems thinking, urban observation, and organisational insight. Cities, like organisations, often hold together through layered and imperfect forms of adaptation rather than through seamless coherence.

Reading ahead of my first Exec MBA paper this year, I realised I’ve been working with complexity for years. I was using a language for it, one grounded in relationships and creative practice.

Through my MFA research, grounded in Fluxus, relational aesthetics, and social practice, I’ve been operating in systems where:

outcomes can’t be predicted

participation is distributed
meaning emerges through interaction
uncertainty is something to hold, not resolve

During the EMBA, I began to recognise these patterns in frameworks like Cynefin and Complexity Leadership Theory.

Event scores → enabling constraints
Participation → distributed leadership
Relational process → adaptive systems

This wasn’t about applying management theory to art. It was recognising that my creative practice already maps onto complexity leadership.

The shift for me has been clear:

From decision-maker
to condition-setter
to steward of systems in motion

Grateful to my lecturers for helping me see and articulate this, Chris Gallavin, Stephen Kelly, and Dave Snowden for the Cynefin framework.

Here's a link to my substack where I deep dive into a project from my MFA at Whitecliffe College in 2019 - 2020.

ps. we need more creatives in leadership and governance!

https://mycreativepractice.substack.com/p/practising-complexity

Honoured that my work 'Keep Care: If birds can see blue' was selected as a finalist in the Walker & Hall Waiheke Art Award 2025, over on Waiheke Island.

Out of 179 entries from across Aotearoa New Zealand, 35 works were selected for exhibition. This year’s selector and judge is Julia Waite, Curator of New Zealand Art at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

Keep Care explores mending as repair and disruption. Using fallen birds’ nests and visible mending techniques, the work considers how beauty, strength, and care can coexist with loss, and asks us to reflect on the unintended consequences of trying to repair what may be beyond control.

Congratulations to all the other finalists and winners!

https://www.waihekeartgallery.org.nz/shop/exhibition-artwork/keep-care-if-birds-can-see-blue/

Last week Museums Aotearoa surprised me with a message saying I’d been their most engaged member for the year and offered a book voucher to celebrate ~ so lovely!

I chose one on Eva Hesse, an artist whose work has always resonated with me, innovative, sensual, and sculptural, yet she also struggled with self-doubt.

It all arrived in the same week I marked one year at the Hundertwasser Art Centre with Wairau Māori Art Gallery. A year full of building, connecting, and reimagining what engagement and care can look like in a contemporary arts organisation.

In the past twelve months I’ve:
– Developed our first Employee Value Proposition, including a new paid Wellbeing Day for staff
– Written our first Fundraising Strategy and built a grants database from the ground up
– Secured new partnerships and hosted our first Business After 5 event, helping bring the Sustainable Business Network into Northland
– Refreshed our Friends & Membership programme and grown our network of supporters
– Reconnected with our original fundraising community and national peers

It’s been a year of steady groundwork. The kind of work that happens behind the scenes but sets up everything that’s to come.

Engaging stakeholders and advocating for arts and culture has never been more challenging, but I’m deeply motivated by the belief that arts and culture are central to a life well lived. Many of us - like the team at Museums Aotearoa - are playing the long game and working hard to keep creativity visible and valued.

Alongside this, I’ve started an Executive MBA with Massey University, exploring how mana-enhancing leadership, ecological thinking, and strategic practice can strengthen Aotearoa — making real impact in people’s lives and being good stewards of this beautiful place.

Big thank you to the team at Museums Aotearoa!

There’s so much more to come, and I’m excited for what’s next. 💛

Another awesome weekend with brilliant leaders - emerging and established.

Such a fun and engaging team to work with, be challenged by and learn alongside.

Big ngā mihi nui to Madelize Bekker, Leadership and People is my favourite paper. Great to hear from our guests Chris Wyborn and Brent Westein, really valuable insights and connections to leadership practice.

Ngā mihi to my fab team, Lisa Maya, Kelly Feng MNZM, and Joshua Vitali. We presented on Satya Nadella’s Leadership at Microsoft, we are all interested in leadership with empathy.

At the heart of Nadella's leadership was a commitment to people first and to leading with empathy.

We discussed key insights that can form a solid foundation for cultural shift in diverse organisations:

A Deep Connection to Purpose

Leading with Empathy

Empathy, “the ability to understand and share the feelings of others”

Embedding a Growth Mindset

We went on to share insights into what this looks like and how we can make practical application of these principles in workplaces and communities.

So excited to have been invited to be part of this thoughtful project.
All are welcome to join us at the opening next Friday 5 - 7pm, 6th June.

Come on down after work, say hello and then head on up to Hangar Art and Framing for their opening, make it a night of art and friends!

Ecologies
Opening 5-7pm, Friday 6 June 2025
The Shutter Room Gallery, 7 Rust Ave, Whangārei

Curated by Marcel Allen and featuring work by Alan Squires, Ashleigh Zimmerman, Ellen Smith, Megan White, Angela Rowe, Lisa Clunie and Marcel Allen. Thanks to Creative Communities WDC.

Artist Talks 11am, Saturday 7 June 2025

Workshop 10am-2pm, Saturday 14 June 2025

Exhibition 6 June - 26 July 2025

Ecologies brings together a collection of Northland artists whose work explores different local environments and the ways in which we interact and relate to them.
Ecologies is a provocation. It looks to inspire personal and/or collective action. Through reflection on our own understanding of what is meant by ecologies and how we fit into our own environments it will illuminate what is meant by kaitiakitanga and taking care of the natural and man made environments and the organisms that inhabit them.

.smith.photographer .nz Whangarei ShutterRoom Whangarei District Council .northland

Engage, Motivate, and Persuade, EMBA weekend number two, done and dusted.

Lots of fun and stepping up, true to Fashion Runway styles, we 'Made it work!'

Big thank you to my team, Oliver Johnson and Rufat Bunyat! Thank you Simon Shen CA for the photos 💪

Our first day consisted of individual presentations on a topic of our choice. My presentation, Keep Care, discussed bringing together my creative practice and leadership practice.

Keep Care is my foundation of relational and mana enhancing leadership, and I shared my research question:

How does Keep Care translate into a practice of leadership and relationship building?

I pitched a conversation, ending with; What does Keep Care look like in your leadership spaces?

University

Kia ora koutou freinds!

My work is continuing in the Arts and Learning space at .northland where we are collaborating with Dr Maggie Buxton of @ to share knowledge and skills for creatives.

AI is everywhere now, and many people use it, we're about understanding the risks, ethics and what we need to know if we choose to use it.

If you are a Northland based creative, funder, or interested to learn more, join us for a FREE session, funded by Foundation North, supported by Creative Northland.

Register for this FREE 1hr Online Seminar - 8th April, 6pm - 7:30pm

This is a Funding 101 Session designed to bring you up to date with current funding models and opportunities as well as practical guidance on how you might approach seeking funding.

We'll explore how AI can help with your efforts at each stage and discuss potential risks, integrity issues, transparency, and safeguards.

Like our other informative Online Sessions, there will be a presentation to introduce ideas and information followed by questions and discussion.

Maggie is Director of AwhiWorld, a local/global transdisciplinary lab who have delivered AI training across Northland to a diverse range of creatives as part of their Strange Intelligences Project.

Angela Rowe is experienced in Arts and NFP Fundraising and has had success with major arts funding bodies. She offers practical feedback as a Creative Northland Creative Advisor.

Creative Northland is pleased to offer this session in partnership with AwhiWorld thanks to funding from Foundation North.

Please register by completing the form below.

https://forms.gle/NEwsYKoD8MxiKzQ3A

You will receive your link within 24 hours of the session