Source: Auckland Council
We seek applications now, from experienced and adventurous artists for our 2025 park based artist’s residency. The selected artist will live by the sea, in Barr Cottage, Little Huia – an ideal base for exploring the surrounding Waitākere parkland.
The artist in residence will create site-specific art about a habitat, creature, character or feature of the Waitākere Ranges Regional Park. The artist’s residency work will be shared with our park visitors in some way – usually through a performance, event, workshop, exhibition, recording, publication or on-park storyboard.
Artists living within parks 24/7, witness things our visitors often miss. For eight weeks they delve into the nature of a place and get a sense of sites or species of significance. Embedded within a park, they serve as our ears and eyes and draw on what they see and hear to create art which reflects these immersive experiences.
This regional park residency offers a two month stay on the shores of the Manukau Harbour from November-December 2005 and is open to innovative, experienced and professional artists. We welcome proposals from writers, filmmakers, composers, choreographers, sculptors, painters, printmakers and other creatives.
View towards Manakau heads.
Applications close 21 February 2025. More information and documents to guide your application are available here.
Moon and sun prints
Kate van der Drift our 2024 artist enabled us to see ‘her park’, Waitawa, in a new light – with her suite of photos taken by the light of the moon. Some of Kate’s ethereal moonlit photos now grace the gritty façade of Magazine 4 (an old industrial explosives warehouse) at Waitawa Regional Park.
Kate van der Drift our 2024 artist in Residence.
Another tranche of Kate’s residency work, camera-less prints of plants, which harnessed the sun and water as ‘developers’ will be exhibited as part of the Festival of Photography in May 2025. One of Kate’s plant-based prints and interpretation of her experimental process to make it, will stay permanently where it was created – at the bach at Waitawa, for future users of the bach to enjoy.
Over three nights, Kate explored the park in this ethereal moonlight, and some of these photographs are presented here.
To see the range of projects artists have produced and the benefits to both artist and park visitor please visit here.