UPCOMING GALLERY EXHIBITIONS AND EVENTS
The only contemporary art award in Aotearoa New Zealand with ecology at its core.
The Estuary Art and Ecology Awards are Aotearoa’s only annual contemporary art awards with ecology at the core. Artists are invited to research and respond to the Tāmaki Estuary, explore the ecological value of this vital waterway, and encourage action against its pollution. Finalists will be exhibited in the Malcolm Smith Gallery at UXBRIDGE Arts and Culture and winning artworks will be intelligent and innovative responses to ecology in the field of contemporary art.
Submissions page will go live on 4 April 2025.
KEY DATES
Entries open 4 April 2025
Entries close 23 May 2025
Finalists Announced 13 June 2025
Exhibition of Finalists 5 July – 31 August 2025
Opening function and awards ceremony Saturday 5 July 2025, 2:30PM
AWARDS
First Place: $5,000
Second Place: $2,000
Third Place: $1000
Merit Awards (2): $250 + $150 Gordon Harris Art Supplies Voucher
People’s Choice Award: $1,000
JUDGE – HANNAH BUCKLEY, PhD.
Image courtesy of Hannah Buckley.
Hannah Buckley is a Professor of Ecology and the Head of the School of Science at Auckland University of Technology who specialises in biological variation in community ecology and understanding the processes that structure biological communities. Her current focus is on how a better understanding of biological diversity can be used to enhance the functioning of human-modified ecosystems, such as sand dunes, tussock grasslands and agricultural landscapes. She received her PhD from the University of Alberta, Canada in 2000. In 2016, whilst Associate Professor at Lincoln University, Buckley was awarded a Bullard Fellowship at Harvard University. From 2017 to 2019, she was a lead investigator in the Biological Heritage National Science Challenge.
Buckley has co-written many publications, including ‘Predicting Ecological Change in Tussock Grasslands of Aotearoa New Zealand’, ‘Connecting through space and time: catchment-scale distributions of bacteria in soil, stream water and sediment’, and ‘Is there gender bias in reviewer selection and publication success rates for the New Zealand Journal of Ecology?’
SPONSORS
The 19th Estuary Art and Ecology Awards are generously funded by Auckland Council’s Howick Local Board, Tāmaki Estuary Environmental Forum (TEEF), the Rice Family Partnership, and Gordon Harris Art Supplies.
PHOTO OP. X Malcolm Smith Gallery presents LONG COVID, an exhibition of solo and collaborative work by Matt Henry and Emil McAvoy. LONG COVID developed out of a period of intense and sustained conversation between the artists which began during the first Covid-19 lockdown of 2020
Focusing on their shared interest in abstraction, the exhibition features McAvoy’s recent Covid paintings and Henry’s ongoing work with real estate signage. Both artists explore the motifs of reductive geometric abstraction as a form of mimicry, lifting and adapting their compositions from visual communications and signage.
At the nexus of applied art and painting, the exhibition explores notions of contagion – between forms of art and design, and between the political and poetic potentials of post-formalist approaches to abstraction.
Emil McAvoy Bio
Emil McAvoy is an artist, curator, lecturer and art writer. His primary role is Collections Curator for the Vice Chancellor’s Office at Auckland University of Technology, where he also lectures in Photographic Practices and Communication Design. McAvoy has an MFA (First Class Honours) from the Elam School of Fine Arts, and has also lectured at Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design, Victoria University of Wellington and Massey University across a range of disciplines.
McAvoy’s art practice is underpinned by an interest in the shifting cultural roles of artists – the artist as medium, critic, activist, citizen and public intellectual. His work spans a range of media including photography, painting, video and text. He has realised projects with City Gallery Wellington, The Dowse Art Museum, Aotearoa Art Fair, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, Ilam Gallery at the University of Canterbury, and Old Government House at the University of Auckland. He has published widely as an essayist, critic and arts journalist for all the major print and online platforms in Aotearoa. He is the founder of independent curatorial platform PHOTO OP. and publishing imprint PUFF PIECE.
Matt Henry Bio
Matt Henry has an MFA from RMIT in Naarm Melbourne, and is based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. He has exhibited a number of solo projects with Starkwhite, and undertaken several solo installation-based projects with public galleries including the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts. His work is held in public and private collections including the Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade, and Elevation Capital Art Collection.
Henry’s practice deals with the legacies of modernism and the allegorical potentials of painting. Primarily interested in the language of reductive abstraction, Henry’s ongoing investigation explores the interconnected histories of art and design and the problematics of viewing or considering painting in isolation. Drawing on the notion of commodification, Henry considers the history of cross-pollination between art and design to position painting within a broader field of signification where the hegemonic place of painting and values of art and commerce are blurred.
Matt Henry & Emil McAvoy Collaborations
While maintaining solo art practices, Matt Henry and Emil McAvoy have been collaborating on selected projects since 2015, connecting complementary approaches to painting, and a shared interest in the legacies of geometric abstraction. McAvoy has published writing on Henry’s practice for the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, they have appeared in artist talks together, and also supported the development of each other’s solo practices through ongoing conversation.
In 2022, McAvoy invited Henry to stage the inaugural exhibition for PHOTO OP., a nomadic independent curatorial platform. The resulting exhibition, Double Grammar Zone, represented a pivot for Henry into medium format photography and an extension of his painting practice. In 2023, the pair collaborated on Political Landscape, a PHOTO OP. Edition co-opting the new National Party graphic identity which had been deployed across Aotearoa in the lead up to the general election. LONG COVID is their first two-person show.
Image Caption: Matt Henry, Black Mountain 2025
Acrylic on linen, 1200mm x 900mm
Photograph courtesy of the artist.
Our gallery is currently not showing any exhibitions – check out our upcoming exhibitions for more information on what’s up next.
Join emerging artist, Estelle Ruijne, and Visual Arts Coordinator, Zoë May, for an afternoon of conversation on Estelle’s poetry. We’ll be exploring themes also found in her debut exhibition, Metamorphōsis, Estelle will also walk us through poems and concepts that inspired her while creating this body of work.
Estelle’s poetry is readily available to read alongside her exhibition at UXBRIDGE or you can click here to read Estelle’s poetry in your own time.
This event is free and open to everyone, we only ask that you RSVP with your name to visualarts@uxbridge.org.nz so we can ensure there are enough resources.
About the exhibition
Metamorphōsis is a collection of paintings that explore the confusion, discomfort and uncertainty that often comes with growing up.
Her figures peel at their skin, their spines sprout wings, or they slowly emerge from unravelling cocoons, all shedding layers that reveal something entirely new has grown beneath the surface. In each of them, a metamorphosis has taken place. The unwitting characters in Ovid’s Metamorphosis experience dramatic transformations into plants, animals and other half-human creatures as a way of being given new life. In much the same way, Ruijne uses her art to visualise the invisible metamorphosis she and her friends have been undergoing.
Despite their often fantastical imagery, her expressive artworks are grounded by a sense of relatability. There is a permeable tension between the fear of and hope for change, of the discomfort in the familiar and the allure of the unfamiliar. Distress and hesitancy battle to overcome the yearning for something more that shines through the overarching turmoil. It is this feeling of pressure, of push and pull, that deeply marks the transitory period into adulthood. Metamorphōsis reminds all of us that change is inevitable, regardless of how hard we fight it.
About the artist
Estelle Ruijne is an artist and poet who explores the transformative and fluid nature of the human experience. Currently a student at Howick College, she plans to pursue a Bachelor of Visual Art double majoring in Painting, Printmaking and Drawing, and Communication Design at AUT after completing her secondary studies. Estelle is committed to adapting and evolving these concepts through further exhibitions. Metamorphōsis is her debut exhibition.
