Swan Lake. Part 1

Swan Lake. Part 2

The Downfall of Mrs Apple

Chatfield

Mrs Apple

Pillow Soles

Twelve Apostles

Mr Mutton Man

Sir LLD

21 and Closing 

The Price of Loo

They Whippy

test test test

Brood

 graduated Massey Univesity with a First Class Honours Degree in Fine Arts. Her recent work navigates themes of self-discovery, unconscious biases and vulnerability. Swney’s use of fabric can be viewed as part of a historical continuum and critique of our cultural heritage, which saw ‘textiles’ as medium and vocabulary typically assigned to women. Her tufted rug ‘paintings’ address the nuanced journey of self-awareness and societal expectations – through the unseen and the unspoken. They offer a space to explore complex dynamics faced by young females navigating social interactions within a patriarchal framework, hinting at how societal pressures and personal experiences influence their strategies for asserting themselves.

Swney’s subject matter floats between abstraction and realism, developed from both memory and experience, using materiality and tone to define and redefine these intents. In this respect her partiality discernible forms exploit the all-important edge between form, colour and texture to relay experience and expressions of emotion, without merely ‘depicting a scene’. These playful works explore the ability to simultaneously produce beauty and pleasure from the complex interplay of personal and collective struggles.

Jess Swney

East of Kaipara

 East of Kaipara – Canto 8  

East of Kaipara – Canto 7  

 East of Kaipara – Canto 6

East of Kaipara – Canto 5  

East of Kaipara – Canto 4  

East of Kaipara – Canto 3

 East of Kaipara – Canto 2 

East of Kaipara – Canto 1 

Omapere

Kirirua 

Te Awanga

Motuihe

Motutapu

Ponui 

Houhora

Canto ii

Onepoto

Pikarere

Adams Island

Ahipara

Hauraki II

Hauraki II: Panel 3

Hauraki II: Panel 1

Hauraki II: Panel 2

Adams island

Repanga

Hauraki II: Panel 5

Okakari

Hauraki II: Panel 4

Canto ii- detail

Otūmoetai

& Andrea Bolima - installation

Tāmaki 

Tāmaki- installation at Aotearoa Art Fair 2023

Rakiura 

Tāmaki

 Piopio

Waihua

Rakiura

Otonga 

Oraka

Roger Mortimer was born in Mangakino, New Zealand in 1956. Since 

 is one of New Zealand's most significant living artists working in the ‘landscape’ genre. Mortimer has been aptly described as ‘a contemporary visual mythologist’ and is widely recognised for his distinctive use of medieval imagery, juxtaposed with early marine maps of Aotearoa. His work gives a post-modern and post-colonial take on the charting of the local coast lines. 

Mortimer is interested in the nature of attachment in the psychological sense. When this fundamental relational need is disrupted, it generates conflict, adaptive behaviour and intense suffering. His paintings and weavings explore these themes and have been described as “an allegorical scrambling of time and geography, that pushes at the limits of the human imagination” [

], giving rise to a dense layering of colliding or intertwined worlds and systems. In Mortimer’s fantastical landscapes and watery coasts, people and creatures enact dynamic vignettes of horror and hope.

Mortimer graduated from the Elam School of Fine Arts in 1999. In 2014 he was the Paramount Award Winner in the Wallace Art awards - one of New Zealand’s top art awards. In 2017, a survey exhibition of his work, ‘Dilemma Hill’, was shown in public galleries in Wellington and Auckland. In 2021 Mortimer had three works included in the landmark exhibition “

Oceania Now: Contemporary Art from the Pacific

” at Christie’s in Paris – a showcase which represented a unique opportunity for the French and international market to engage with some of the most important and established artists working in New Zealand today. The same year also saw the publishing of: Apocrypha : The Maps of Roger Mortimer - a 160 page monograph with essays examining the last 12 years of Mortimer’s map paintings and weavings. Mortimer’s works feature in a range of significant public, corporate and private collections including:

Waikato Museum of Art and History, Te Whare Taonga o Waikato,
The University of Auckland Art Collection, Waipapa Taumata Rau,
The Angela Morton Collection, Takapuna Public Library
The Ballin Collection
The Art House Trust
Barry Hopkins Art Trust Collection
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs
The Wallace Art Trust
The Collection of Peter Jackson & Fran Walsh
The Collection of Sam Neill




Roger Mortimer

Spring Roses ii 

 Wabi (Sunflowers)

Journée series #4

Studio Tulips 

Nasturtium Study

Charlotte in Studio 

Ask Me Now

Journée series #1

Journée series #6

Journée series #5

Never Tomorrow, Always

Call You Rose

Light Blue

Studio Roses

Lucy Wallace

Untitled

I Mean You

I Still Get Jealous

House of Dreamers

And She Was

Back of the Sun

Ten to Noon

Sunbathing

Chaise Lounge

Sunday Afternoon  

Chicot

Becca with Flowers

Tree Stump

The Pistachio Stripe

Self Portrait with Sun Hat

Journée series #2

Red Cap Headphones (Self Portrait)

Charlotte

Journée series #3

I Wonder When

Anatomy of a Sunday

Only Forever

Nasturtium Study ii

Sunday Afternoon

They Say it's Wonderful

White in Pink

Blue Jean Becca

For What it's Worth

Painters Crocs 

After the Wind

Ramblin Rose

Ten to Three

Journée series #7

Gastuv

Studio Roses ii 

Whisper Not

Killing Me Softly

Nick Herd, born and raised in Tāmaki Makaurau and has a Bachelor in Art and Design from AUT. Painting has always been a part of Herd’s life - gradually taking over - as his practice explores what it means to be human. Herd’s current practice depicts abstracted human subjects and floral arrangements, both representing a captivating study of existence. His energetic brushstrokes preserve a subtle interplay of emotion, vulnerability, and a resilience that define living species. Herd’s work is characterised by expressionistic mark making and unrefined - sometimes grotesque - figurative depiction which navigate the tensions between embodiment and liminality.

Known for his thick application of paint, referred to technically as impasto, Herd has carved out a recognisable style distinctly his own. With a sophisticated palette and incredible artistic restraint - especially when using excessive amounts of oil paint, the artist captures movement and life in every textured stroke. His thick gestural application of paint, explores the performative nature of painting and the physical discharge of energy and anxiety; where the subject becomes a vessel for contemplating the human experience.

Herd’s recent series of still life oil paintings, are offered to us both in paint and sculpted form. With radically layered textures, and bold defining strokes; the flowers appear as if they are moving across the canvas. The artistic process for Herd, originates with fresh floral arrangements which he paints over a series of days; meaning that each time he sits to paint the arrangement has bloomed, decayed or moved. This transformation of subject, results in a series of paintings full of play and motion with oil paint laid on so thickly that the texture of the palette knife is clearly visible.

Bachelor of Art & Design: Auckland University of Technology

 finalist exhibition
2018 Wallace Art Awards 

The Wallace Art Trust, Auckland
Citadel Capital Collection, Auckland


Art Market: Our top picks of inspiring art to buy now

Nick Herd 

Two Faced

This Never Happened

Echo Chamber

Duplicity

Acolyte

Plastic Patriot

Threat Level Orange

Sanewashed

Terms of Entanglement

Status Quo

Coterie

Three Martini Lunch

Installation 

Bigly

Flipflopper

Drill Baby Drill

Sheeple

Bamboozler

Mercurial

By Fiat 

Installation

The Truth Untold

Faux Amis 

Hyperbolic

Installation (Three Martini Lunch)

The Truth Untold 

Orange Lotus

Tangerine Tariffs

Faux Amis

By Fiat

Bigly 

Stable Genius

A House of A Different Colour

Monique Lacey's sculptural practice is deeply rooted in the linear forms of her childhood in Holland, acknowledging the classic minimalist grid where architecture finds its foundational shapes.

Lacey's exploration of this familiar geometry is driven by a fascination with the transformative potential of rudimentary materials. 

Utilising commercial packaging as her primary medium, Lacey creates structures that blend volume and surface with meticulous craftsmanship. Beginning with flat-packed configurations, these materials undergo a metamorphosis through layers of plaster, paint, resin, rubber, wax, varnish, and pigments, which both bind and reveal the underlying frameworks.

Central to Lacey's artistic approach is a respect for the authenticity of her materials, coupled with deliberate acts of manipulation. Physical processes such as assembly and intentional deformation imbue her works with a spectrum of emotions—from playfulness to aggression—resulting in forms that oscillate between destruction and repair.

Emerging within the context of Minimalism, a movement historically dominated by male figures such as Donald Judd, Lacey diverges by elevating the utility and materiality of everyday objects into profound artistic statements. Rejecting overtly gestural styles associated with Abstract Expressionism, she challenges established norms through her methodological embrace of seemingly destructive gestures.

Lacey's sculptures defy traditional distinctions between surface and form, image and object, thereby disrupting conventional categorizations of sculpture and painting. While honoring Minimalism's ascetic principles and the importance of materiality, her work celebrates decadence in its process, creating richly textured skins that invite contemplation of profound artistic tensions.

Monique Lacey

Hoops That Once Belonged To My Mother

Drop Earrings That Once Belonged To My Mother

Hoops Study 

Earrings That My Aunty Gave To Me, 2025

Monica Rani Rudhar | Aotearoa

Drawing the Windows 

Hoops Study  - Green and White

Monica Rani Rudhar is an artist working on Gadigal Land across video, performance and sculpture. Born to Indian and Romanian migrant parents, her work speaks to longing and loss as she navigates the cultural disconnection that stems from the complexities of her multi-racial ethnicity. Her work is delicately personal and takes the shape of a restorative autobiographical archive that seeks to record her own histories where these stories can exist permanently, unlike those that have been passed down orally from her family which remain fragmented.

Rudhar graduated from University of New South Wales with a BFA in Art and Design (2021) and her practice attempts to restore familial histories, traditions and rituals that have been dispersed by migration, drawing on the labour required to move past barriers that stand in the way of reforging connections. Monica’s sculptures focus on her personal relationship to South East Asian Jewellery and its power in bridging a connection to her heritage. Rooted in the significant events where certain pieces have either been lost, gifted or taken away, Monica draws on how these totemic objects unite her with her distant family who live overseas, and a culture that she feels disconnected from. The significance of these objects is exemplified through scale and repetition which act to memorialise these heirlooms and give permanence to oral histories.

As a testament to Monica’s status as one of the most exciting emerging artists working in Australia, in 2024 she was been curated into three public exhibitions across NSW and Victoria, with major installations at: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (Primavera), Bunjil Place Gallery, Chau Chak Wing Museum. Earlier this year Rudhar won the 2025 Blacktown City Art Prize and in 2023 she was the recipient of the Art Incubator grant, as well as the winner of the 2023 Gosford Regional gallery Emerging Art Prize.

Jess Swney,Roger Mortimer,Nick Herd ,Monique Lacey,Monica Rani Rudhar - Spring Catalogue

Spring Catalogue