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Ms.Interpreted, 189 Ponsonby Road, Auckland (2026)

21/06/2026

Ai Weiwei, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995 (triptych of gelatin silver prints documenting performance action).

We tend to assume that important things naturally attract attention. But in practice, many valuable things remain invisible until something dramatic happens. The urn existed for two millennia before becoming one of the most famous ceramic vessels in the world. The moment Ai Weiwei dropped it, it became one of the most discussed ceramic vessels in contemporary art. The destruction paradoxically, amplified its cultural value.

What’s fascinating is that the work predates social media by more than a decade, yet it seems to anticipate the current moment. Platforms reward novelty, surprise, conflict, outrage, and emotional intensity because these are the things most likely to interrupt our scrolling. Ai Weiwei understood the power of attention and spectacle.

I wonder how the work is experienced today by the people seeing it for the first time. In 1995, the image of an artist smashing a 2,000-year-old artifact was genuinely shocking. In 2026, after years of doomscrolling, clickbait headlines, and precise algorithm, I wonder whether we have become desensitised to exactly the kind of provocation that gave the work its power.

On now at Auckland Art Gallery as part of Forever Tomorrow, curated by Hutch

18/06/2026

One of the surprises of last night’s Open Late: Forever Tomorrow was Xu Zhen’s Hello (2018–19).

I thought I knew exactly what I was looking at: a Corinthian column, a symbol of Western civilisation animated into a technological object. The robotic aspect initially struck me as potentially gimmicky, and a little too straightforward in its commentary on surveillance and control.

What struck me, however, was an unexpected tenderness. This giant column seemed almost to want connection. AI technologies are often framed as tools and mechanisms of extraction and convenience, entangled with systems of data capture, yet Hello refuses that simple binary. Rather than feeling threatened by its gaze, I found myself drawn towards it. The way it slowly curled and followed visitors felt like a timid, gentle giant.

It’s rare for an artwork to move me from critique to encounter, and rarer still for it to unsettle the certainty of my own assumptions.

A kind of Nietzschean thread runs through this encounter…. the idea that when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back. Beyond a metaphor, it describes a condition of looking in, where spectatorship is never one-directional: what you observe also begins to shape you. The object is no longer passive; it becomes agentive within the encounter.

A fantastic show, with excellent curation Hutch 💫💫💫 Go see it at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki

16/06/2026

Already missing this beautiful goofball. Gregor Kregar Sara Hughes 🥰💫

Looking after him reminded me how dogs have a way of reorganising time around walks, meals, and routines. Strangely, it made me more efficient.

It also brought back memories of wandering through the Hall of Animals (Sala degli Animali) in the Vatican Museums last month. Created in the late eighteenth century as a kind of stone zoo, the gallery is filled with ancient sculptures of dogs, horses, lions, birds, and mythological creatures. Some are hunting, some are nursing their young, all poised somewhere between movement and stillness.

There’s an old saying that if you want to make money as an artist, paint children and dogs. I can see why dogs have remained such enduring subjects. They have a way of making themselves impossible to ignore.

13/06/2026

David Hockney has died.

Exactly four weeks ago, on 16 May, I stood in in front of A Bigger Splash, painted after his move from London to Los Angeles. I keep thinking about that image: a split second of impact rendered almost absurdly still. It captures something that is almost impossible in life … the attempt to hold a moment that, in reality, disappears instantly.

Hockney understood that tension between speed and duration. The splash is instantaneous; the painting makes it slow and deliberate. His work repeatedly returns to attention and to the insistence on looking with joy, on treating life as something to be observed with affection. Even in his own framing, art is bound up with love, alongside the everyday essentials.

He leaves behind a clear instruction: notice more, stay longer, let moments expand.

David Hockney left a lot behind … he left the biggest splash. 💦

11/06/2026

The generosity of the turnout for Joe Sheehan’s Line Drawing at Tim Melville Gallery made it almost difficult to spend time with the works themselves. Almost.

I was struck by a tension running through the exhibition: hard materials carrying delicate gestures. Carrara marble, jade and stone become surfaces for moments that feel fleeting. A raindrop striking water, concentric ripples expanding outward. I found myself thinking of Hone Tuwhare’s poem Rain: “I can hear you making small holes in the silence.”

The Gates of Heaven works transform wire fences, painstakingly carved into stone, into something more psychological. They strike me as reminders of the limits we construct for ourselves: the boundaries of habit, expectation, fear and imagination.

Across the gallery, a chain carved from a single piece of Tihaka Pahoke (Argillite) was particularly compelling. Attached at one end, it hovers vertically towards the floor, somewhere between freedom and constraint. A shackle rendered so beautifully that it asks whether the things holding us back are external at all.

On the floor sits a map like form that seems to occupy the space between these worlds. Neither entirely natural nor entirely human made, it feels geographic and speculative, almost like a treasure map. A wayfinder. A suggestion that there might be a route through.

Taken together, the works prompted me to think about how easily we limit our own potential, and how often we build our own fences and forge our own chains. Yet they also point toward other possibilities: the simple pleasure of listening to rain, feeling sunlight through closed eyelids, and paying attention to the world around us.

Perhaps the map is not a map of territory at all, but a map back to wonder.

Congratulations, Joe Sheehan . A beautiful exhibition that leaves plenty of room for viewers to find their own path through it. ☔️

09/06/2026

I visited the in Venice a week after it opened, and I’m still thinking about its central provocation: “The Only True Protest Is Beauty”, a phrase that initially feels simple, but reaveals itself to be radical. Borrowed from Phil Ochs, it frames beauty as a force that generates transformation.

Curated by Dries Van Noten and Geert Bruloot, the exhibition brings together fashion, jewellery, ceramics, glass, photography, sculpture and design without disciplinary hierarchy. More than 200 objects are arranged intuitively, through proximity and contrast rather than chronology or canon-building. The result is a chain of sharp, sometimes disorienting juxtapositions: contemporary ceramics beside historical interiors, experimental fashion against ornament, rough surfaces next to exquisite craft, seductive works sitting uncomfortably close to unsettling ones.

In a social-media saturated present, attention has become a contested material. Platforms reward immediacy, outrage, and opinion; experience is constantly compressed into reaction. Against that, crafted objects, carrying embodied skill, labour, and patience, demand a different tempo. They insist on being looked at longer than the feed allows. That slowdown becomes a form of resistance by interrupting the conditions under which culture is usually consumed and judged.

In Venice, during Biennale season, the exhibition constructs something closer to a Wunderkammer (a cabinet of curiosities), where the refusal of explanation and meaning feels almost unfashionable right now.

It was a joy to encounter two works by , completely at home in the constellation, neither isolated nor over-framed, but very much part of the conversation. 💋♥️

In that sense, beauty becomes one of the few remaining ways of producing shared attention that is not fully mediated byopinion.

07/06/2026

One of the most memorable pavilions at this year’s Venice Biennale was Japan’s presentation by Ei Arakawa-Nash.

The premise is disarmingly simple: visitors are invited to carry baby dolls throughout the pavilion. Yet the moment I picked one up, I remembered the subtle shift in posture, the feeling of moving through the world while caring for a small body that depends on you. For a moment, I was transported back to when my own children were babies.

What makes the work so compelling is that it transforms the entire pavilion into a social space of care. Strangers navigate the exhibition one-handed, cradle babies in sunglasses and excellent onesies, and unconsciously adapt their movements around them. The atmosphere is playful, joyful and surprisingly intimate.

But beneath the fun is a sharp proposition. Venice’s national pavilions are often described as the “Art Olympics,” where countries compete through cultural representation. .arakawa.nash , a q***r artist living in Los Angeles who no longer holds Japanese citizenship, unsettles that model from within. Here, nationhood is not presented as fixed identity but as something shaped through kinship and interdependence.

What stayed with me most is that the artwork isn’t really the dolls. The artwork is the temporary network of obligations that emerges between strangers. A reminder that living together is built not through small acts of attention, responsibility and care. 🍼🍼🍼

In a Biennale shaped by Koyo Kouoh’s In Minor Keys, with its emphasis on how we live together, this felt like one of the clearest and most affecting responses to the theme.

04/06/2026

I’ve been holding off posting about Fiona Pardington’s Taharaki Skyside at the Aotearoa New Zealand Pavilion since returning from Venice. Partly I needed time to process, partly because the pavilion’s initial silence during the boycott actions gave me pause. Venice in 2026 is not a neutral space. The ongoing inclusion of Russia and Israel has made that undeniable. It is a site of politics, of protest, of artists being asked (loudly and publicly) to take a position on what complicity looks like.

And yet, these seventeen towering portraits of endangered and extinct manu set against dark backdrops in a former Venetian orphanage, stopped me in my tracks. Many of these birds were collected, classified, and displaced during the colonial era, carried to museums far from the whenua they belonged to. Their presence in Taharaki Skyside asks us to reckon with what institutions have inherited, what they have suppressed, and what it takes to activate them back into our shared world. This is about whakapapa made visible: ancestral knowledge and ancestral grief held in the same frame. About being in conversation with the past and understanding our complicity in how it arrived.

These birds make you feel seen by something that no longer exists.

Which is why it matters that has now added her name to the letter asking for exemption from the Biennale’s People’s Choice Award — joining 39 national pavilions and 67 artists and collectives who refuse to allow their work to normalise ongoing violence.

This is the bigger picture Taharaki Skyside was always asking us to see. Extinction is political. Whose stories survive, in the wild, in museum drawers, on the walls of Venetian palazzos … is political. And the decision to stand alongside other artists who refuse to allow their work to be used to normalise the unacceptable is, in its own way, a continuation of everything Fiona Pardington’s birds are saying.

I’m glad she signed. I’m gladwe’re in that conversation. And I’m so glad I got to stand in that room. 🕊️

02/06/2026

Recently visited the Kapoor Foundation in Venice with artist .teheuheu 🕳️. Built on water, the city continually unsettles perception: reflective, disorienting, and perpetually on the verge of being lost within. Movement is a constant negotiation between body and environment, requiring small adjustments in orientation and perspective.

Kapoor’s work amplifies that condition. Through reflection, distortion, and impossible shifts of scale, the body becomes both subject and object at once. Walking through the foundation, I was struck by how perception is constantly tested and recalibrated.

A few steps beneath At the Edge of the World (1998/2026), an immense suspended black dome, space itself seems to bend. Voices gather and return from unexpected directions, creating a fleeting moment of intimacy within the work’s vast scale. Step outside that point and the effect vanishes. What appears monumental is in fact remarkably precise, tuning the relationship between body, sound, and space. The work hovers between presence and disappearance, drawing attention to the fragile thresholds through which perception itself is organised.

Back in Aotearoa now, I keep returning to questions of optics and positioning: how art is an attempt to change reality, and the order in which it’s presented to us. 🔮

31/05/2026

One of the great pleasures of my work is spending time in artists’ studios, and few are as joyful, imaginative, and inspiring as Gregor Kregar’s. 💫💫💫

Every visit leaves me thinking about the generosity of his practice. The work is rigorous and deeply considered, attentive to mathematics, materiality, and form, yet it never loses its sense of wonder. Clouds have become a recurring conversation between us, appearing throughout the sculptures as both structure and metaphor: fleeting, romantic, impossible to pin down. 🫶🏻

There is a rare balance in Gregor’s work between elegance and playfulness, between precision and delight.

I’m looking forward to writing about his upcoming exhibition with . Watch this space. ☁️

Ms.Interpreted

21/06/2026

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16/06/2026

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