Holli McEntegart, Self Portrait with Arlo, 2021.
Join artist Holli McEntegart for a kōrero about creating at the intersection of art and motherhood and the fluidity that’s required to maintain your creative identity whilst raising a family. She will discuss her transition from artist to mother-artist and her ongoing work, Inhabit; a social practice project making the lived experience of mother/parenthood visible through art, installation and community care.
“Parenthood is often seen as an obstruction to a creative practice, but if we shift our perspective of the labour of the home, of care, of mothering; can it instead be seen as a valuable site for creative practice? If we reframe the intersection of making and motherhood, how do we then hold and support artists navigating those waters?”
Linda Lee, Muka Pito Tie, 2023.
Artist, Linda Lee will be demonstrating how to make muka pito and you can attempt to make your own. Linda will briefly discuss how they should be used.
Please join us for the artist talk and making workshop. There will be space to share, discuss and ask questions.
This is a family friendly event, all welcome and feel free to bring your tamariki.
If you have the night off from the kids, you are invited to stay for a reception afterwards, meet the artist with refreshments provided.
Holli McEntegart, Inhabit, Wellington, 2022. Image credit, Anne Noble.
Holli McEntegart is a Tamaki Makaurau-based interdisciplinary artist, moving fluidly between social practice, video, performance, photography and textiles. She is known for her use of unique materials including salt, spiritual mediums, carrier pigeons and a barbershop quartet. Holli received a Bachelor of Visual Arts in Photography in 2006 (NZ), and a Masters of Visual Art and Design from Auckland University of Technology in 2013 (NZ), which included a one year MFA scholarship at Carnegie Mellon School of Art, Pittsburgh (2011, USA). Her work has been performed and exhibited throughout the USA and New Zealand.
In 2014 Holli was an Artist in Residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine (USA), and spent many years living and working as an artist and artist studio manager in New York City. In 2018 she trained as a full spectrum doula after giving birth to her first son in Brooklyn, New York. Returning to Aotearoa in 2020, Holli was awarded the 2021 Letting Space Public Arts Commission for her ongoing participatory project, Inhabit. Her making is process and praxis based, engaging an audience who are often present as participants and co-creators. Holli is a reproductive justice advocate and Mother to two boys, aged 5 and 1.
My studio practice is inextricably connected with my everyday life. It exists in response to, persistently, in protest. It shape-shifts and waits around corners. With every project, my work becomes a document of my lived experience, mapping a search for belonging and interconnectedness. As a Pākehā New Zealander, I'm guided by both the Celtic traditions of my colonial ancestors and the decolonizing lens through which I try to live.
Becoming a mother has pushed me to the very edges of my selfhood. As a maker, it is there that I find a new materiality that longs to be reimagined, repurposed and rehoused. I seek public engagement through community participation, weaving individual stories into collective narratives. I look to those community relationships as material; small gestures like sharing a cup of tea become intimate acts of mark making.
Most recently I’ve been interested in the residue of labour found in textiles, the stains and holes that map their journey as they are handed down through generations, In unraveling and reconstructing, not just the yarn, but the story, history and traditions embedded in the warp and weft.