Congratulations To Leanne Mulder!
Image credit: Leanne Mulder – “What The Land Remembers”
Congratulations go to Leanne Mulder for coming second in the The National Contemporary Art Award 2025 with her work What The Land Remembers.
This award was launched in 2000 by the Waikato Society of Arts and has been facilitated and hosted by Te Whare Taonga (previously named Waikato Museum) since 2006. With a prize pool of more than $30,000, this prestigious competition reveals the cutting edge of Aotearoa New Zealand art through its fair, blind-judging process. The judge for the 2025 competition was Nigel Borell MNZM. He is currently Curator Taonga Māori at Auckland War Memorial Museum and has had an active role in the arts and culture sector spanning the past 25 years. This year’s award had a record-breaking number of entries – 480 – of which 53 finalists were chosen. Borell said it was great to see the breadth of entries, “from the tip of the North Island right down to the south”. “It really is a national outboard when you start to think of the record number of applications this year, so it’s neat to be going from strength to strength.”
Leanne’s award winning work was described as a “quiet evocation of the land as both witness and keeper of what has been forgotten and found”. Borell said Leanne’s piece was captivating because it’s talking about the land, landscape and “those retro conversations around landscape painting and painting practice”.
The exhibition of finalists – Friday 1 August to Sunday 16 November
Te Whare Taonga o Waikato Museum and Gallery
1 Grantham Street | Hamilton | Entry is Free
Exhibition At The Botanic Gardens
The exhibition is on daily | Auckland Botanic Gardens | 102 Hill Rd |
Friday 8 Aug to Friday12 Sep | Entry is Free
Erica will be at the Botanic Gardens on Sunday 17 August, 11 – 2.30pm if you would like to catch up with her personally.
How To Disappear
Image credits: Steve Carr
In How to Disappear, now on at the Gow Langsford gallery, Steve Carr leans deeper into his enduring role as the comic outsider, part magician, part sad clown, pursuing vanishing acts that never quite succeed. Across film, sculpture, and photography, Carr stages a series of near-escapes: crouched behind lenticular plastic, lost in coloured smoke, or swallowed by a moving bush. Each attempt is earnest, absurd, and knowingly doomed. Beneath the humour lies something more tender: a longing for transformation, transcendence, or simply a moment of reprieve from being seen. A figure tries to merge with the landscape but never fully escapes it. Whether casting abandoned dog-poo bags in bronze or turning his own legs into a lamp, Carr shows us that even in the act of trying to disappear, something of us always remains – half-visible, gently ridiculous, and strangely moving.
30 July – 23 August | 28-36 Wellesley Street East | Auckland CBD
Mon-Fri 10am – 5pm | Sat 10am – 4pm
Home Away From Home
“Home Away from Home” a solo exhibition by internationally acclaimed New York based artist José Parlá examines the perspective of a landscape that transcends a single “home,” constantly evolving and shaped by memory, movement, and human connections. The exhibition at KOTARO NUKAGA in Japan, will showcase how his art poetically challenges concepts of language, politics, identity, and our definitions of place and space. Parlá’s approach to mark-making is both physical and textural, integrating bodily gestures into a painterly stream of consciousness that features aspects of addition, erasure, and layering, thereby questioning the status quo of visual culture. These new paintings are inspired by Parlá’s time spent and connections he made in Japan. For Parlá, who has experienced the many facets of Japanese cities and formed bonds with friends and artists, the new works are “a tribute to my friends and the moments that enriched my artistic journey.”
Fiona Pardington-Venice Biennale
Dr Fiona Pardington will represent New Zealand at the 2026 Venice Biennale with her exhibition Taharaki Skyside. This major new work for Venice builds on the content of her 2024 series Te taha o te rangi, ‘the edge of the heavens’, which consists of photographs of Aotearoa New Zealand birds preserved as taxidermy specimens in museum collections.
“In my work, birds can symbolise love, loss, warnings, and connection – between worlds, between people, and between the past and present,” says Pardington.Taharaki Skyside makes direct connection with the realm where birds act as messengers between the mortal and spiritual worlds, she says.
Applying the precision, care and responsiveness to historical and cultural resonances she has previously brought to taonga, Pardington’s remarkable avian portraits engage with the tradition of memento mori. By resurrecting their dignity, charisma and wildness, Pardington also brings these long-dead birds vividly to life.
Taharaki Skyside opens at La Biennale di Venezia on 9 May 2026.