Winter Season
Stockroom Display
8 – 25 July 2026
Emma Hercus, James Watkins, Benjamin Cotter Dephoff, Jess Swney, Suzanne Lustig, Hugo Van Dorsser, Kieran Trainor, Amber Hearn
As the gallery closes its doors for a short winter break, Winter Season will remain on display through the windows from 8–22 July. Viewed from the street while the gallery rests, the exhibition offers a colourful pause before reopening its doors and welcoming visitors back inside on 23 July.
This stockroom exhibition brings together works by gallery artists Emma Hercus, James Watkins, Benjamin Cotter Dephoff, Jess Swney, Suzanne Lustig, Hugo Van Dorsser, Kieran Trainor, and Amber Hearn. Embracing colour, energy, and warmth during the colder months, the exhibition spans multidisciplinary practices that explore landscape, memory, ecology, storytelling, and the spaces between observation and imagination.
THE ARTISTS
Each of Emma Hercus’s canvases open her world of washy colour and whimsy a little further. Reflective of her rural upbringing, with its many characters and rich whenua, she never strays far from the coast.
Known for her kind naïve faces, surrounded by native foliage and animals, Hercus lays many blankets of pigment. Rich colours that she then scratches back and recalls back to the layers beneath - where has this world been? In what light has it been cast once before? Central to each is the Plimmerton-based artist’s love of people - their stories, energy and shared moments. Often with vague memories of togetherness and Aotearoa’s landscape composed in scenes of folkloric warmth in the background.
With an exploratory sense of line, and loose hand over his brush - James Watkins’ multidisciplinary practice enamours itself with the potential of colour and deeply engages with the materiality of mark-making. Smooth and then textured, translucent and then rich all in the same breath.
With an abstracted and organic vocabulary, the Auckland based artist works predominantly in expressionistic painting. Unravelling themes of subconsciousness and the interconnectivity found within the natural world, Watkins draws on his years living and working abroad. Australia, London, Paris, Istanbul and Mexico City all filtering in from the periphery as he returns to Aotearoa, traversing the forests, hilltops and changing skies of home.
Benjamin Cotter Dephoff is an oil painter whose practice captures the unique tramping culture present in Aotearoa. His work draws heavily from personal experiences in the bush, casting a romantic lens over familiar scenes—a fleeting view, a DOC hut, or the soft light filtering through native trees.
Close to photorealistic yet influenced by early impressionism, his paintings balance detail with atmosphere, aiming to evoke the calmness, clarity, and reflection that tramping offers. Ben is based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, and holds a Bachelor of Design with Honours.
To work with wool is to entangle yourself in its threads - Jess Swney’s tufted rug ‘paintings’ working as a manifestation of her hands - each stitch acting as a mark of care, time and self. Embracing the subtleties of flaw and human presence behind each work to discuss self-discovery, unconscious biases and vulnerability.
Holding a First Class Honour in Fine Arts from Massey University, the Tāmaki Makaurau based artist is grounded in an intergenerational connection to textiles, as she floats between abstraction and realism. Creating a softness with wool tufted illustrations depicted in a deep, bold colour palette, that simultaneously reminisce on the tradition of textile craft, while concurrently using it to speak to contemporary womanhood. How we face society, and how society faces back to us.
Suzanne Lustig’s world is built of textured oil pastel blocks, faces outlined with indian ink in a patchwork of rich oranges and blues, dusty pinks and teals in acrylic. Works that thrum with Lustig’s gesture and movement, her hand felt in each irregular stroke. An intuitive and dynamic negotiation between an artist and her medium.
Born in the Netherlands, Suzanne studied graphic design at The Hague’s Royal Academy of Arts before transitioning to illustration and painting. Now having lived in Aotearoa for ten years, she finds herself at the bridge between the two, travelling back and forth - synthesising the spontaneity and depth of European movements like CoBrA, together with New Zealand’s serene but bold landscapes. Playful, witty and harmonious.
As if we were an outsider looking in on a dream, Hugo Van Dorsser's paintings are a manifestation of nostalgia - emotionally charged, playful and surreal.
The Christchurch based artist merges his own personal history with imagined narratives, balancing his compositions between graphic and bold, to a more fluid movement and diffused brush stroke. Working with familiar objects from our collective childhood, naive stick figures and primary colours, Van Dorsser’s canvases invite us into a surge of memory, finding where these images live within our subconscious and where they stand now.
Kieran Trainor is an artist and writer exploring the intersections of ecology and painting. They are interested in how painting provides a contemplative space to hold contradictory, layered histories of nature and land.
Their work draws connections between everything the light touches, including memory, science and embodied practice. Utilising their Queerness to cross discipline fluidly, their work aims to daylight an interconnected ecosystem that we have always been a part of. Kieran holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from Toi Rauwhārangi Massey College of Creative Arts.
Amber Hearn is a visual artist working on Dharug and Gundungurra Land, Blue Mountains, Australia. She grew up in both Tamworth, regional New South Wales, and Papua New Guinea, where she was immersed in nature and developed a strong connection to land, and place. Her primary practice is painting but she has also worked in installation, performance, video, and virtual reality.
Exploring notions of the feminine, birth, motherhood, and the body, alongside her personal history and childhood experiences, Amber’s work reflects experiences that are both individual and universal. Interior spaces and symbolic forms, woven into the landscape, serve as both a representation of current place and memory, allowing the works to function as self-portraits. Deeply interested in ancient history, symbolism, and particularly women, Amber further explores these themes through colour, form, layering, repetition, and primal gesture.