Aotearoa Art Fair
Galleries | Booth 07

Peter Adsett | Biography

Throughout a career spanning almost thirty years, Peter Adsett has enlightened us about the unique properties of paint. In his hands, it is never a passive medium invented to support colours.

Painting number 10 from The Blue Room series demonstrates this, firstly, by the deliberate limitation of means to just different shades of blue (white not being a colour as such), from deepest indigo, through an electric cerulean, to palest egg-shell. When deployed non-imitatively, purely as a material in abstract work, paint is shown to operate, to act, as if it had energy independent of any form it may depict. Adsett’s paint refuses to remain inert, straining against its framing edges, expanding in every direction into the supporting wall, even as it co-opts the white as an integral element in this 'interior'.  

In Adsett’s series, each painting undertakes a different move in a particular game, that of challenging the historical paradox of transparency. Why blue? Is it because in the studios of the classical masters it was used for what was unpaintable: air? Every detail in the paintings challenges a viewer to, tie me down if you can', as each blue works with, and against, its neighbour – blue, black or white – to assert opacity or translucence. No resolution can be reached, which is the source of endless gratification for a viewer, who becomes caught in a sustained gaze, as part of the game. — Mary Alice Lee

Valerie Bos | Biography

Valerie is predominantly a painter. Movement and stillness are at the heart of this new series of work: Time-Scapes & Still-Scapes. Throughout are figures that are still or poised, finding strength in stillness; and landscapes that have been derived from many visits roaming around the volcanic remains of Tongariro National Park, particularly Te Onepoto (Rangipo Desert).

In the past Valerie has mostly delved into aspects of the human experience, more the ‘what’ rather than the ‘who’. In particular, there has been a focus on relationships, both with the self and between people, as well as the spaces they inhabit.

Landscapes that while seemingly solid and immovable, are in fact the product of dynamic and often violent forces over a long period of time. What appears static and unchanging is constantly being reformed and reconfigured. Still, but constantly in motion, thus echoing the figures in the paintings.

Glen Hayward | Biography

Conor Jeory | Biography

Conor’s intricately carved waka hoe (paddles) and patu (Maori weapon) pieces are fashioned from slabs milled from a grand rimu – a taniwha long undisturbed – taken from its languorous, deep slumber in the Waipoa River out here on the Poverty Bay Flats. Their utility has been gradually diminished to friable failure, carrying  their former heft and vigor purely as a memory, a fiction.

Conor was born in 1969 in Tairaiwhiti Gisborne, New Zealand, from Ngati Porou te iwi descent, he has worked as a self-taught artist in a multidisciplinary process from music, theatre, film-making, , ceramics, wood and stone carving, silver-smithing and jewellery fabrication. He finds that each piece leads to the next “If laid out in a line you would see how each material and expression directly influences the next regardless of the media and technique involved...”

(Lest We Forget) how fragile we are – carvings by Conor Jeory

Virginia Leonard | Biography

Virginia was awarded the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize in 2025. Her work was selected for The Only True Protest is Beauty, Fondazione Dries Van Noten, Palazzo Pisani Moretta, Venice, Italy, (Apr – Oct 2026) and Salone del Mobile, Galleria Rossana Orlandi, Milan, Italy (April 2026).

Virginia holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design, which she completed in 2001. She has won numerous awards and residencies, including the 2025 Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize, 2019 Artist-in-Residence prize in Finland, the Open to Art Ceramic Award from Officine Saffi, Milan, Italy, and the Glass House/Stone House Residency in Chenaud, France. In 2017 she won the Ceramic residency at Guldagergaard, Denmark. Closer to home, she was awarded the Merit Award in the 2015 Portage Ceramic Awards, Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, Auckland. Leonard’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout Australasia and internationally, including exhibitions in Switzerland, Italy, USA, and Denmark, and is held in numerous public and private collections worldwide, including Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, and the prestigious Ann G. Tenenbaum Collection, New York. She is profiled in the influential Thames and Hudson book 100 Sculptures of Tomorrow.

James Ormsby | Biography

James is a well recognised national artist who has over 20+ years of Visual Art practice in New Zealand & overseas including over 20 solo shows and over 80 group exhibitions. He has received major Grants from Creative NZ and the British Council for practice-based research at University of Oxford (UK), and resulting exhibitions in London, Melbourne and Auckland.

He has a Bachelor of Education (Visual Art) from The University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, (1990), and a Master of Fine Art from The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, Victoria, Australia (2002). 

His work can be found in numerous collections including Te Papa Tongawera, The Arts Trust Collection, Auckland City Art Collection, The Waikato Museum of Art and History, The University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand, The University of Melbourne, (Victoria, Australia), and private collections throughout New Zealand and overseas including The Benetton Collection (Geneva, Switzerland).

Evan Woodruffe | Biography

Evan reveals his aim is to make a painting that is doing something, rather than just pointing to something. And doing without certainty, without knowing – there’s a lot of value in exploring with your imagination. It asks not what the work is, rather to see what the work does.

Evan regular exhibits with Galleries, public institutions and art fairs throughout Australasia, including his significant contribution to the NZ Special Exhibition at 8th Beijing Biennale (2019). He produced a major exhibition for Tauranga Art Gallery (2018), a large temporary work for Dunedin Public Art Gallery (2015), performance work for the 5th Auckland Triennial (2013), and worked with Whakatane Museum to produce a show based on their photographic archives (2013).

Evan is a Member WeCreate (New Zealand), Brand Ambassador for da Vinci Artist Brushes, Brand Ambassador for Schmincke Artist Colours, has an MFA (1st Class) University of Auckland and a PGDip Art & Design from AUT.