11 June — 2 August 2026
Opening Event: Thursday 11 June • 5:30 - 7:30PM
OBJECT MAKER AOTEAROA
Fellowship Re:Tale
Juliana Durán, Mel Ford, Eva Kerer, Bebay Millán, Birgit Moffatt, Samuel Montgomery, Alex Wilkinson, and Sarah Ziessen.
Image courtesy of OBJECT MAKER AOTEAROA.
Re:Tale brings together a group of contemporary object makers working across ceramics, jewellery, installation, and design, to explore the dual meanings of “retail” and “re-telling”. Developed through the Object Maker programme, the exhibition extends from the earlier project Re:Object (Depot Artspace 2025), expanding the focus from objects to the narratives, environments and systems that produce and sustain them.
Re:Tale creates a space where personal histories, cultural memory, and material processes intersect with the systems of production and exchange that define contemporary life. Throughout the exhibition, artists draw on their own backgrounds and disciplines, engaging with migration, identity, spirituality, and domestic rituals - while also acknowledging their position within the conditions of consumer culture, rather than outside it.
Materials carry much of this enquiry: Discarded fragments are reworked into jewellery that questions value and permanence. Plaster, clay, and found objects become vessels for memory, belief, and belonging. Industrial and crafted forms sit alongside one another, exposing tensions between durability and disposability. In some works, humour and play disrupt expectations; in others, restraint and repetition allow meaning to emerge gradually.
Rather than offering a singular position, Re:Tale holds varied approaches in play, allowing contradiction to co-exist. It asks what it means to continue making objects within systems shaped by overproduction, and convenience and whether acts of making can also become acts of reflection, resistance and change.
About the artists
Juliana Durán
Juliana Durán is a Colombian visual artist whose practice explores the potential of found materials, in object making and installation. Her work explores the concept of home; the sacred; the relationship between place and space and the sense of belonging as a social construction.
These works mark the beginning of a layered personal inquiry into spirituality; a first attempt to re-understand belief while confronting how it becomes institutionalised and commodified. The tension here is between spiritual hunger and the structures that claim to mediate it: faith intertwined with transaction through spectacle, architecture, and the circulation of devotional objects. Within the framework of re:tale, the work considers how sacred narratives are displayed and consumed. What is being sold when salvation is promised? What remains when spirituality is separated from institution? There are no clear answers yet. This is an opening gesture in a much longer search for the sacred beyond establishment; in material, in nature, and in the everyday.
Juliana Durán
Mel Ford
With a creative practice focused on ceramics, glass and discarded waste, Mel Ford works across the genres of object making and installation. Based in rural Horowhenua, her creative practice often references the transformative effects by which time and other forces can alter objects and materials.
Sheet glass is often a material designed to be looked through instead of looked at. In creating work for this exhibition, Mel Ford has re-used sheet glass sourced from discarded display cabinets and old windows, transforming them into three-dimensional objects through exposure to the forces of heat, gravity, and time. In doing so, the artist gives new life to old things, retelling material stories with the addition of new chapters where liminal moments occur and new endings are possible.
Mel Ford
Eva Kerer
Eva Kerer is a contemporary jewellery artist based in Whakatū Nelson, who has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. As a conceptual maker, she often explores themes of identity and memory, questioning conventional notions of value and craftsmanship.
Pink Drip explores the role of jewellery and the jeweller within a consumerist society defined by widespread fast fashion. Formerly valued as handcrafted memory keepers, protectors, and identity markers, charms have been collected over a lifetime, imbued with intimacy and significance. Today, however, charm necklaces are sold as disposable fashion jewellery, cheap, pre-styled and devoid of meaning. Pink Drip is inspired by that shift. Each charm is made from mass-produced fragments from our consumer landscape. Set in polished brass, these throwaway objects are elevated to the status of relics, receiving the care and respect once reserved for heirlooms.
Eva Kerer
Bebay Millán
Bebay González Millán is an Auckland-based artist and designer working across different media grounded in her Industrial Design background and exhibition design practice. Her work draws on personal memories of her Mexican cultural roots.
The monster I hold — My work reflects the icons of my culture — folklore, traditions, colours and religion. Through different mediums, I explore representations of the devil in sarcastic, humorous ways. Working with distinct materials and forms, I shape “evilness” through humour and femininity in my sculptures and designs. I also draw from the desert landscape where I grew up; cacti have become recurring elements in my practice, appearing in various forms. Trained as a designer, I am always thinking about efficient and sustainable ways of making, conscious of material waste, process, and carbon footprint. For the Re:tale exhibition, I returned to these roots and to the stories embedded in my work. I wanted to create pieces of furniture - objects that could act as companions in my daily life and echoes of my home in Mexico. Colour, humour, and playfulness shape this set of stools: bright colours like home, and spiked legs reminiscent of cactus forms. Each piece stands as its own identity, giving life to an inert object through design.
Bebay Millán
Birgit Moffatt
Birgit Moffatt is a German multidisciplinary artist based in Ōtaki. Her work spans installation, sculpture and object making using traditional and contemporary techniques.
I must walk again where my memories still live —In this installation Birgit Moffatt explores the deep connection between memory, place and identity offering a personal perspective on her childhood in East Berlin. Plaster becomes a carrier of memory, holding the texture of the vast housing estates that she associates with safety, familiarity and family. A place that no longer exists in the same way. Drawing subtly on Brutalist forms, the raw, muted surfaces suggest both permanence and fragility. Leaving the structures open, Moffatt creates window-like frames that invite looking through. They become thresholds between the past and the present, memory and physical reality. These frames form quiet corridors of reflection, where recollection overlays the present moment. Through them, she reassembles a personal geography shaped by both comfort and distance, tracing the enduring pull of the places we leave behind yet continue to carry within us.
Birgit Moffatt
Samuel Montgomery
Samuel Montgomery’s practice centres on precise geometric forms, with a focus on proportion, joinery, and subtle surface detail. Sitting between craft and material logic, his collaborative approach produces work that is considered, human, and quietly playful.
Collaboration is central to Samuel Montgomery’s practice. Working alongside makers, architects, and artists introduces constraints that sharpen ideas and shape outcomes. Within these limits, he finds space for subtle experimentation, resulting in work that feels considered, human, and quietly playful rather than overly precious or resolved.
Samuel Montgomery
Alex Wilkinson
Alex Wilkinson is a ceramic artist based in Kihikihi, Waikato, specialising in nerikomi vessels where vibrant patterns emerge from the interplay of control and chance. Her work explores colour, process, and the stories embedded in everyday objects, reflecting on both personal narrative and the role of handmade objects in our daily lives.
This retail / re: tale work explores the tension between making for meaning and making for sale within a consumption-driven, profit-focused world. It reflects my ongoing attempt to reclaim a process I deeply value from the product-driven systems that are easy and safe to fall into. The process is embedded with my personal narrative, where colour acts as a language for emotions I cannot easily articulate. The material resists control through warping and variation, allowing each piece to emerge slightly beyond what I had planned. While the end result often screams to become a mug or a market-ready product, in this work I resisted. There is a tension between pure artistic expression and the demands of production. This work tells the tale of my joy while navigating the pressures of a retail-focused world.
Alex Wilkinson
Sarah Ziessen
Sarah Ziessen is a Rotorua based potter making functional ceramics for food, drink, and daily use. Her work explores consumption, value, and the role of handmade objects in shaping more thoughtful ways of living.
For Re:Tale, Ziessen pairs a ceramic coffee cup with plastic underwear, using their contrast to reflect on the systems that produce and normalise disposable living. The work retells familiar acts of consumption and domesticity, revealing the tension between permanence, convenience, cleanliness and waste.
Sarah Ziessen