First Floor Galleries
11 September - 19 October
Yuji Iwase, Nikita Emma Hesketh & Warisara Thomson:
Ritual Baby
Work by Warisara Thomson
Before written laws, we lived by rituals, superstitions, and stories, guiding forces that shaped how we connected, survived, and made sense of the world. Ritual Baby explores the relationships and identities forged through these practices and the sense of belonging found in the spaces between them.
The Pah Homestead holds its own quiet rituals, echoes of histories, energies rising and settling. Within this pink cube, we offer a space of warmth and welcome, an invitation to pause, and to feel. Though each of us carries different rites and rhythms, we found ourselves drawn together by the quiet pulse of shared superstition, of daily acts made sacred.
Yuji Iwase approaches the sculptural method of casting as a ritualistic method of bodily production. Using texts, fragments, and traces of the everyday as material to be perpetually cast in a cycle, their work explores the intersection between the partial and whole, text and textuality, trace and origin.
Nikita Emma Hesketh collects discarded ephemera from The Arts House Trust, checklists, invoices, media sheets, and pulps them into handmade beads for protection string and a book. A sympathetic magic is held within these materials, transferring the care and attention to the day-to-day running of the Arts House Trust, transmuted into these handmade objects. Her work invites others to engage in shared ritual through making and recording.
Warisara Thomson uses video to parody instructional guides on religious etiquette, reimagining Thai Buddhist shrines as simplified sculptures. Her work reflects on the tensions between belief, cultural ritual, and spiritual uncertainty amid illness.
Yuji Iwase is an artist working primarily with a sculptural and installation practice. They graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Arts at AUT University in 2024. Their practice explores repetition, material language, and the blurred boundaries of the body through a queer and intertextual lens. Recent group exhibitions include Tablets at CAS Gallery, New Plymouth (2024), Eidetickers at Satchi & Satchi & Satchi, Auckland (2024), and RELAY: AUT Toi Ataata Visual Arts at Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery (2024).
Warisara Thomson is an artist currently completing an MFA at Whitecliffe College. Her practice explores the entanglements of Thai culture, diasporic identity, mixed heritage, and how religion and spirituality intersect with health, chronic illness, and the body. Working primarily across performance, video, and sculpture, her work moves between personal narrative and wider cultural mythologies. She has exhibited with Unreliable Landscapes, was a finalist in the 2023 National Contemporary Art Award at Te Whare Taonga o Waikato Museum and Gallery and received the Board’s Choice Award at the 2021 Eden Arts Art School Awards. Her photobook work has been published by PhotoForum.
Nikita Emma Hesketh is an artist whose practice explores material transformation, memory, and the overlooked rituals of everyday life. She holds a Master of Visual Arts from AUT University and was the recipient of the AUT Arise Sculpture Award in 2023. That same year, she was a joint winner of the Eden Arts Art School Award for SE(M)POISES and received the Kate Edger Contemporary Art Award. In 2024, her work was exhibited in RELAY: AUT Toi Ataata Visual Arts at Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery.
About the Artists
Ritual Baby is curated by Yuji Iwase, Nikita Emma Hesketh and Warisara Thomson, participants in The Arts House Trust Summer Intern Programme 2025. Now in its ninth year, the intern programme is designed for senior secondary and tertiary students considering career opportunities in the visual arts. It allows students to engage with the public interface of a major gallery during the summer period. The interns are also given the opportunity to submit exhibition proposals and explore the Arts House Trust Collection.