Ritualists are those who hold their hand closest to the fire, those that perform a sacred duty to be the connection between worlds, as our eyes can only settle upon the humanoid. The chosen volunteers that bear the understanding of a language never spoken. To see a message of truth in the stars above or earth below, a power that flows unaffected by time or threats of oblivion. Dedicated to those who take the plunge, who evoke and light the candles. Taking part in the act of creation. These are not artefacts of the past but blueprints for a liveable future.

Draunikau is a recipient of the Emerging Artist Residency at Studio One Toi Tū. This exhibition is the celebration of the end of the residency.

White Blood is a multi-channel installation exploring the intimate legacies of migrant labourers within imperial structures. Weaving together diasporic memories of rubber plantations in Malaysia, camphor extraction in Taiwan and the history of Manila Hemp in the Philippines, the work reflects on migratory labour, colonial economies, and the inherited systems that shape bodies and memory. Through everyday objects, White Blood examines how imperial power operates beyond territorial conquest, embedding itself in domestic and bodily rituals, manifesting in routine acts of surveillance.

Yin Chi is a recipient of the Emerging Artist Residency at Studio One Toi Tū. This exhibition is the celebration of the end of the residency.

Gaps of Silence moves through the liminal spaces between reverence and forgetting, tracing the presence of the old gods of Oceania and the echoes left by colonisation's silencing. These works listen to what lingers in the hush between worship and erasure, where the divine waits to be remembered. Through gesture, colour, and form, art becomes both invocation and archive, a space where ancestral voices are remembered, not as myth, but as enduring presence. In this silence, memory transforms into ceremony; absence into knowing.

This exhibition explores the quiet, intimate act of writing letters to the people we love. Sitting down with a pen in hand, we express what we often struggle to say aloud; how much we miss someone, when we hope to see them again, or simply how life is unfolding. Fa’amele invites you to consider when the last time was you wrote a letter to someone, or even to yourself. During the show, you are welcome to write your own letter and place it in a pre‑paid envelope to be posted at the end of the exhibition.

Tōfā Mamao explores the intricate landscape of diaspora grief, focusing on how Samoans in Aotearoa navigate loss within a modern urban context. The work examines the tension between demanding cultural traditions, which often consume the immediate period of mourning, and the pressure to quickly return to daily life. Through large-format photographic portraits, video, and evocative poetry and music, the exhibition captures the resilience of those whose farewells must travel across oceans. Drawing from personal experience and community dialogue, the artists reflect on how heritage both anchors and complicates healing when there is little space to truly grieve.

Terms of Endearment considers how intimacy is shaped through language that both reveals and avoids. Using clay and text, the work explores emotional residue, repetition, and the labour of holding what cannot be resolved. Connected forms share one body, offering a physical logic to emotional experience—shared, fluid, difficult to contain. Text appears as declaration, deflection and confession. Memory is carried through touch and material presence, allowing vulnerability to surface without explanation.

He Taonga Ānō te Hau: Treasures That Still Breathe weaves together new and earlier works by multidisciplinary artist Siniva Mokaraka. Working through a Māori and Pasifika lens, Mokaraka reimagines still life to honour taonga as living carriers of mauri, memory, and spirit. Each fine art digital print is composed from taonga of personal significance, printed on archival Hahnemühle paper, and framed in handcarved rimu. Created for Matariki, the works speak to remembrance, renewal, and ancestral connection, encouraging reflection on the taonga, stories, and relationships that continue to shape whānau and whakapapa.

Haerenga by noa hāmana (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kura, Ngāti Toa) explores Māori migration and its continuation in the 21st century. Waves of dispersal across Moana-nui-a-Kiwa brought interludes of radical cultural adaptation, generating ancestral stories that hold mana and connect tangata Māori to whakapapa. Migration holds a paradox of possibility and loss, raising questions of choice, push, and pull—echoed today in movement from Aotearoa to Australia. Rooted in colonial economic histories, these cross-colony pathways have long carried the weight of displacement. Haerenga returns to submerged dreams and forgotten stories, revealing culture as fluid, interconnected, and continually redefined. 

Curated by Giulia Pianelli.

He Taniwha, He Tipua explores narratives of taniwha in Te Ao Māori. This exhibition brings together a collective of three Toi Māori practitioners; Madison Redman (Ngāti Kahu ki Whangaroa/Ngāpuhi), Fern Ngatai (Ngāti Porou/Tainui) and Tristan Marler (Te Rarawa/Te Aupōuri) to express the diverse representations and symbolic significance of taniwha across Aotearoa. Through the lens of pūrākau and Toi Māori He Taniwha, He Tipua examines the origins, guardianship roles, and relationships of taniwha with different iwi, hapū, and landscapes across the motu. These themes will be explored through paint, print, raranga and sculpture.

This Matariki mā Puanga exhibition is a rangatahi-led exploration of intention - what is meant, what we carry forward, and what is chosen.

Rangatahi reflect on what they choose to nurture, and how they locate themselves within whānau, hapori, and whakapapa. Through visual art, installation, and written expression, they respond to lived experience with truth and care.

d3sir33 works as both a creative force and a misleading illusion, driving growth while longing for an unattainable return to the past. This tension creates cycles of attachment and self-reinvention, where identity remains fluid and unresolved. Using a maximalist and fragmented visual language, Bailey McNally explores this emotional intensity with colour and mark making. The works examine feelings of disruption and longing as ongoing experiences, through which meaning is constantly reimagined.

Wake Up reflects on life in 2026: the exchange of freedom for comfort and safety, the rise of AI, mass surveillance and media manipulation, and the decline of privacy, autonomy and critical thinking.

Using both traditional and cutting-edge techniques, the artists’ respond to their world-at-large; blending a unique combination of retro and graffiti-inspired design, textiles, and digital fabrication with a nostalgic longing for a golden era now past. The works challenge us to question our current reality and to see the world with open eyes.

Mike Crawshaw’s series of oil paintings explore car wrecks as charged sites of trauma and memory. The car, once a vessel of motion and the future, becomes in its wrecked state an afterimage of an entire organising logic. Stripped of function and picked over for parts, these spent beasts bear the marks of both sudden catastrophe and slow erosion. This collapse is mirrored in paint and brush: form dissolves into abstraction, while colour inverts and pushes toward chromatic excess.

Kay Shibuya's practice focuses on love and peace, expressed through meditative, nature-led works. Using motifs such as cherry blossoms, moana, sky, sun, moon, and forest forms, her work reflects a deep connection to the natural world.

In this series, Kay holds Dubai, Lebanon, Ukraine and Iran in mind, creating each piece as a gesture of care and unity. Through soft, atmospheric mandalas and rainbow-infused colour, the works offer a sense of connection across distance

The 'lichening rod effect' is a term coined by Trevor Goward that describes the phenomena of challenging assumptions through the observation of overlooked natural spaces, opening the door to deeper admiration and renewed curiosity. In Lichening, Tate Agnew studies forgotten urban natural spaces; the moss on the roof of a building, the insects integral to our daily life, and the forgotten mycelium network below our feet. The work celebrates science in its most accessible form and encourages admiration towards the natural world.

Isabella Lepoamo explores the emotional framework of competition, performance, and perfectionism, drawn from her history as a professional synchronized swimmer representing New Zealand. Through self-portrait rhinestone and stainless-steel sculptures, the works examine beauty, endurance, labour, and self-image, reflecting on the pressures of perfection and visibility. The exhibition also considers the competitive environment fostered within art school, and how systems of comparison, achievement, and recognition continue to shape artistic identity and self-worth.

In Aotearoa, insects represent the vast majority of our animal diversity, yet they often go unnoticed. Small World is an interactive digital installation that invites audiences to draw their own bugs and release them into an evolving ecosystem.

This work celebrates creativity and quiet observation. By participating and viewing these digital creations, the audience is invited to slow down, reflect, and find empathy for the small lives that sustain our world.

From the forest floor to the floors of our homes, how does the journey of a single tree shape the future of New Zealand housing?

In Aotearoa, the story of timber is often reduced to a single species: Radiata Pine. Through photos, infographics, models, and diagrams, From the Arborist to the Builder asks us to reconsider the way we grow, manufacture, and build using one of our most vital resources. Looking beyond timber as a mere resource and instead seeing it as part of a larger, living network.

COMMS is an open conversation on control and compromise from the point-of-view of Chinese/Pākehā interdisciplinary artist Alexander 葉 L. Brown. In his third solo exhibition, Brown examines his internal dialogue on familial and chosen culture against external expressions of understanding. This series of abstract works connects opposing forces and tensions that arise through interpersonal exchange.