Hiria Anderson (b.1974, Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Apakura, Rereahu) surveys her immediate surroundings and those individuals and relationships within her community of Ōtorohanga through her painting practice. The artist captures in detail the intimacy, incongruity, and poeticism of the everyday and with it the interplay between tikanga Māori and contemporary municipal life. While her works regularly convey bustling activity, they are equally occupied by a sense of absence; painstakingly depicting figures from obscure viewpoints, vacant spaces, or the minutiae of discarded objects.

Read more about Anderson here

Star Gossage (1973, Ngāti Wai / Ngāti Ruanui) lives and paints on a headland above Pākiri beach, north east of Auckland. Nestled between ocean and river, the artist’s whare is located on ancestral land – a place rich in history and mythology – a landscape that Gossage returns to again and again as both site and subject of her work. There is an immediacy and intimacy inherent in the application of paint and bare unfinished edges of Gossage's paintings, the artist sometimes allowing for glimpses of the raw canvas beneath. Her ethereal portraits of unknown appear as tūpuna or ancestors, their individual identities indefinite. Connected to the whenua, whānau, and wairua of this place, they are at once grounded and otherworldly; their features blurry and indistinct. These women emerge out of the landscape, their forms rendered from a mix of local clay, with chalk pastels, conte, and oil.

Read more about Gossage here

Turumeke Harrington (b. 1992 Otāutahi Christhcurch, Ngāi Tahu) is based in Pōneke Wellington with her daughter and partner. Harrington has a background in industrial design and fine arts. An interest in whakapapa, space, colour and material sees her creating large sculptural installations at the intersection of art and design. The artist's clarity of form and function is supplemented by a poetic pragmaticism and a commitment to making that is at once playful and provacative. Her sympathetic approach to materials combines with a bold colour palette to create engaging works that speak to the artist’s own personal relationships, cultural anxieties, and everyday musings.

Read more about Harrington here

Hannah Valentine (b. 1989 Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland ) lives and works across Tāmaki Makaurau and Tauranga, Aotearoa. Hannah Valentine's practice follows two distinct threads. The first is an interest in the body and tactile sensibilities. If we are being conditioned away from sensibility, towards consumerism, she questions how we might reinvigorate feeling and its importance in the way we interact with the world and each other. The second thread concerns our environment and impending climate crisis.

Read more about Valentine here

Laura Williams (b.1965, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland) has received several awards and residencies since firmly establishing her practice ten years ago. With a major in Sociology, and a career as a union organiser, Williams is somewhat preoccupied with the particulars of human interactions.

There is a joyful irreverence and sharp humor to these works. Williams’ paintings are peppered with references to religion, art history, pornography, design, and social theory. Often locating her figures within bucolic landscapes or highly charged domestic interiors bursting with colour and pattern, they appear surrounded by the detritus of daily life, frequently in various states of undress.

Read more about Williams here