Juliet Carpenter Is Te Whare Toi O Heretaunga Hastings Art Gallery’s 2025 Visiting Artist

27 November 2025

Juliet Carpenter is the second artist-in-residence at Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga as part of the gallery’s Visiting Artist Programme, supported by Creative New Zealand. The programme offers extended support for established Aotearoa artists to develop new work in dialogue with the contexts of Te Matau-a-Māui Hawke’s Bay.

Carpenter is an artist and filmmaker born and raised in Waipukurau, Central Hawke’s Bay, now based in Berlin. Her work is interested in the ways that individuals produce themselves as characters, and often charts the emergence of identity alongside specific technological developments.

Carpenter will return to Hawke’s Bay this summer to produce a new film, which explores the material of ultraviolet light and its connections with image-making. The work will speak to a phenomenon that New Zealand art historian Francis Pound has described as “The Regional Real” – referring to the ways in which settler colonial painters of 20th Century Aotearoa dealt with “the harsh clarity of New Zealand light”. Carpenter is interested in how this light has shaped identities and blurred boundaries between the self and the environment.

The project will be filmed in Hawke’s Bay and Central Otago, with local actors, supported by a collaboration between Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga and Dunedin Public Art Gallery. The film will be premiered in site-specific parts across both galleries during the summer of 2026-7.

Carpenter holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland (2013) and graduated from the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main in 2022, where she studied in the class of Gerard Byrne and was taught additionally by Douglas Gordon, Laure Prouvost, and Wu Tsang.

She was nominated for the 2024 Walters Prize for her outstanding contribution to contemporary art in Aotearoa New Zealand and was awarded the Lowlands Kunstpreis for Exceptional Work on her graduation from the Städelschule. She has exhibited extensively throughout New Zealand, as well as in Australia and Europe.

Carpenter says: “I am so excited to come home and develop this project and look forward to (re)connecting with my home region and the artistic community here.”

Gallery director Sophie Davis says: “We are looking forward to hosting Juliet in her hometown as she returns to develop this exciting new work. The gallery is excited to continue building its programme of visiting artists, fostering new ways of seeing Te Matau-a-Māui through contemporary art, and, in due course working collaboratively with Dunedin Public Art Gallery to connect landscapes across the motu.”

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