Bekah Carran was born in Whanganui in 1976 and currently lives and works in Ōtepoti. She was awarded a BFA from the Otago School of Fine Art in 1998, was the Olivia Spencer Bower Artist-in-Residence in Christchurch, 2003 and the Physics Room Artist-in-Residence, 2007.

Carran’s receptiveness to notions of the everyday and her observations of the contemporary condition are often realised in poetic installations marked by the refined use of unremarkable materials. Responding, in part, to debates surrounding sustainability and environmental decline, Carran manufactures alternative realities – creating opportunities for reflection and hope.

Beau Cotton is a maker currently in Port Chalmers, Otepoti Dunedin. He graduated from Wintec Hamilton in 2012 with a BA in Media arts.

Beau’s practice butterflies between sculpture ,fashion and installation. He works with found object(s) as materials, reworking them into new narratives and possibilities. Rarely being satisfied with the imposed or standard, Beau’s intention is to research and classify the found and composing them into a state of new desire.

My primary practice has been ceramic sculpture. Making forms based on domestic vessels, utilitarian containers, imbued with something of the human to acknowledge the role that domestic objects play in our lives: observing and sharing in our daily routines. The wild clay, that is the earth that sustains us, comes inside, into our homes.

During the process of making these works, there is a lot of refining of form, smoothing the surface, taking off clay here and there. These little pieces of clay can be recycled, let to dry and reconstituted. But instead I like to roll these pieces into beads.

That way the collection of beads is very connected to the rest of my practice, markers in time, part of other works, part of a wider picture. The different blends of clays that I use are recorded here. There is the element of methodically rolling each bead, and the

meditation of that, combined with the stringing up, and the link to the rosary, and prayer beads. And the stringing into a circle that forms a loop, reminding us of the cycles of life, and how we live within wider interconnected systems of all life, here on earth, the clay.

There are hands because there is a lot of touching when working with clay, and hands can connect us to each other, a symbol of greeting.

And a skull for the cycles of life and clay as the ground up bones of the mountains, the earth. Looking at things as a whole (detail #11) is from Suite 23 at DPAG last year, each work takes its title from this show.

Warwick Freeman is a leading designer of contemporary New Zealand jewellery. Born in Nelson in 1953, he is largely self-taught. In 1973 he established his first studio in Nelson and moved to Auckland in 1977, where he became a partner in that city’s renowned jewellery cooperative, Fingers, in 1978. In the 1980s, as a prominent member of this group, he revolutionised contemporary jewellery practice in New Zealand. His work is distinguished by the use of such natural materials as bone, stone and shell.