We are delighted to announce the six pairings that will form the 2026 Works in Progress programme. 

Over five months (August–December 2026), six early-career artists from across Aotearoa will work alongside six Parehuia alumni, receiving one-to-one mentoring, participate in a group online session with invited sector experts, and gather in-person for final group showing and critique. 

We received an overwhelming number of applications and are grateful to our mentors for their time and care during the assessment process. It was a privilege to witness the breadth and quality of practice across the motu. 

Works in Progress forms part of our 20th anniversary programme and is one of several initiatives designed to nourish our sector. The programme is generously supported by Manchester Trust, Hugo Charitable Trust and Chartwell Trust.

Skye Lunson-Storey / Dan Arps  
 
Skye Lunson-Storey (Te Whakatōhea, Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, & Pākehā) is an early-career artist, writer, and editor based in Tāmaki Makaurau, raised in Tauranga Moana. Working across moving image, sculpture, and sound, their practice explores climate change, urban infrastructure, Indigenous futurisms, and wai — asking how we might shift from containing water to living with it. 

Learn more about mentor and Parehuia alumni Dan Arps here. 
 
Thomas Strawbridge / Martin Basher 
 
Thomas Strawbridge is a Chinese–Pākehā artist based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, working primarily with painting alongside site-specific installation. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (First Class Honours) from Toi Rauwhārangi, Massey University in 2023. Thomas' practice engages painting as a material and conceptual site where layered systems of knowledge, inheritance, and representation intersect. A founding member of Punaka Studio, he contributes to collaborative projects, shared studio activity, and public-facing initiatives. 

Learn more about mentor and Parehuia alumni Martin Basher here. 
 
Jamie Howse / Ana Iti   
 
Jamie R H (Ngāti Pāhauwera) is an artist and curator based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. Working across installation, sculpture, and language-based practices, Jamie’s research-led work explores the movement of knowledge, memory, and value through physical, social, and technological systems. Jamie is co-director of play_station artist-run space and has worked in the museum sector at Te Papa Tongarewa and Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga. 

Learn more about mentor and Parehuia alumni Ana Iti here. 
 
Ashleigh Min / Sarah Smuts-Kennedy  
 
Ashleigh Min is an Ōtautahi Christchurch-based artist who explores the vivid yet elusive qualities of dreams through intuitive dreamscape paintings. Often beginning with abstract grounds, she allows forms and images to emerge through a process of painterly discovery, inspired by the natural motifs of her surroundings. Recent developments in her practice have led her to engage with playground imagery and its connections to nostalgia, play, and memory. 

Learn more about mentor and Parehuia alumni Sarah Smuts-Kennedy here. 
 
Kāhu Kaan / Sefton Rani  
 
Kāhu Kaan is an artist who works primarily across sculpture, installation, and photography. Graduating from Dunedin School of Art in 2025 with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Distinction), Kāhu uses materials as a way of exploring how identity is developed through culture and environment, both collectively and individually. Their work incorporates found or foraged materials — such as pāua shell, corrugated iron, and wood — presented in ways that are often surprising or unfamiliar for the viewer.  

Learn more about mentor and Parehuia alumni Sefton Rani here. 
 
Sarah Cowie / Tiffany Singh  
 
Sarah Cowie is a multidisciplinary artist based in Auckland. Her practice brings together puppet and fabric sculpture, activated through video, photography, and installation, alongside illustration, printmaking, and zines inspired by her puppet characters. Through performance, Sarah uses puppetry as a way to explore themes of gesture, communication, and persona. Her lush fabric environments, strange human-like creatures, and ambiguous narratives create an uncanny world that balances playfulness with unease. Influenced by film and theatre—particularly fantasy and horror—Sarah also works as an art tutor, facilitating workshops and contributing to set and stage design for live events and performances.  

Learn more about mentor and Parehuia alumni Tiffany Singh here.

Works in Progress 2025 – Pilot Programme

For the 2025 pilot programme, we were pleased to work with alumni Dan Arps as the mentor and the following artists as the participants:

Antje Tamae Barke
Antje Tamae Barke is a Tokyo born, Pakeha artist who works pre-dominantly with sculpture, installation, and lens-based media to create immersive exhibitions that explore the subjective experience of socio-political history’s and economies through objects and spaces. Utilising the indexicality of objects and materials, Barke employs subversive gestures and interventions to create dialogue between aesthetic histories and issues of class struggle through the experience of a site. Reconstructing and deconstructing material and research-based references in order to transport one site into a poetic reference of another.

Barke completed her MFA with first class honours in 2019 (graduated 2022) and a BFA Hons in 2015 from Elam School of Fine Arts.

Jimmy Ma’ia’i
Jimmy Ma’ia’i is of Samoan and Scottish Heritage. His work explores identity, culture, and the factors which influence the development of these concepts. “Through sculpture, I often utilise everyday, readymade, and found materials, using them as the medium to examine these personal and cultural narratives.”

Ma’ia’i graduated in 2023 with a Master in Creative Practice from Unitec.

Te Ara Minhinnick
Te Ara Minhinnick’s work often involves collaboration, large-scale sculpture, and site-specific installation. “My practice is grounded in whenua, oneone, and uku; thinking with and through material, not only in terms of weight and site, but also as a form of intergenerational knowledge. Over the past few years, I’ve been slowly building a body of work that moves across locations and contexts from Tamaki Makaurau, to Otautahi, and most recently in Poneke, with the long-term intention of exhibiting whenua, internationally. As the work expands materially and geographically, I’m focused on the considerations of protocols that frame the work; especially the outcome or encounter when whenua is taken outside its original rohe. The questions I’m sitting with are as much about material movement as they are about relational accountability.”

Minhinnick gained an MFA from Whitecliffe in 2021.

Nathan Wilson
Nathan Wilson (Pakeha) is an artist, writer, and performer from Tamaki Makaurau, whose practice is a tentative investigation into the relationship between art and ideology. After studying politics and history at the University of Auckland, Wilson gained his second bachelor’s degree in Fine Art at Whitecliffe in 2023. Wilson’s interest in the visual arts is rooted in its connection to the political and the ideological, and his artistic output often takes the form of speculative or propositional critiques on this connection. Working in installation, sculpture, drawing and performance, Wilson’s research-based methodology influences the medium and form of his work.

After graduating from Whitecliffe, Wilson was one of the founding members of Pigeonhole, an artist’s collective with a focus on experimenting with strategies that sustainably enable artists to work and develop outside of the traditional post-graduate institutional/educational context.

Colin McCahon was a gifted teacher and mentor who made an important contribution to the lives of many New Zealand artists through classes at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and later at Elam School of Fine Arts. His legacy and commitment to developing the next generation of artists and the wider community is an important driver for the McCahon House education programme.

The first few years after graduating from art school is a critical juncture in an artist’s career, especially in the current financial climate. Works in Progress is a new programme which seeks to bridge the gap between graduation and professional practice - a need identified in the community.