Our Judges
Stephen M Davies is a New Zealand artist living and working in Matakohe, a small rural town in Northland, New Zealand. He has travelled widely, exhibiting and studying fine art in New Zealand and the UK.
His work is primarily concerned with aspects of personal identity, whereby he is exploring the facets of interpersonal relationships, sexuality, religion and nationality.
Davies has a strong interest in the figure but also uses landscape and the natural world to expand and contrast his ideas. He draws from a wide range of sources including art historical narratives, photography, life models and found images. He enjoys the challenge of working across a range of media including sculpture, painting, printmaking and photography.
Davies completed his Bachelor of Fine Art at Elam School of Art, University of Auckland (1998) and his MA Fine Art at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK (2008). He is a founding member of MGTO Gallery in Maungaturoto and past Manager/Curator of the Invercargill Public Art Gallery.
Miriam van Wezel graduated from the Royal Academy in The Hague in 1978 and has been practising as an artist, exhibiting in private and public galleries in New Zealand.
She came to NZ in 1982 and started working with natural pigments specific to site, such as red/yellow ochre and black sand from 1995.
From 1997-2008 van Wezel lectured in Visual Communication and tutored in Design Studio at Unitec School of Architecture with a strong objective to work with the student’s creativity and teaching them how to best communicate their ideas using the visual language of drawing and model making.
Van Wezel has participated in many Public Art competitions and completed the Victoria Park Column Project with the work called ‘Colours of our History’, 2012. The same year she developed an interactive installation inside one of the bunkers at Fort Takapuna, ‘Shelter’ using recycled concrete wastepipes, lined with coloured
Astroturf. This work is now placed at Mountain View School in Mangere.
Van Wezel has an ongoing interest in exploring the relationship between Art and Architecture and has a critiquing within Bossley Architects since 1993 and has collaborated with glass mosaic wall designs for several of their projects. Since 2008 she has started a studio-based exhibition programme ‘In Private’ from her Cox’s Bay
studio in Auckland to provide an alternative model to the existing dealer gallery model. It alternates group shows with solo exhibitions.
Peter Panyoczki is a highly regarded visual artist. Panyoczki belongs to the 1980s generation of artists who polemically dealt with conceptual art, yet did not simply return to figurative art, instead having a conceptual interest in the question of art as a medium. His works reflect on identity, memory, and materiality, while his practice remains consistent yet continually evolving. His career exemplifies how a contemporary artist can become truly international while preserving personal and cultural layers, and how such a path can be sustained as a lifelong artistic practice.
“I experience work and creativity as the act of giving form to a longing born from the experience of dual estrangement. I was born Hungarian, but in January 1957 my parents fled with me to Switzerland. In recent decades I have lived in New Zealand. Yet I feel at home in all three countries. Today many of us have become
cosmopolitans, whether by choice or necessity, as exiles, refugees, or migrants.”
According to Georg Lukács, philosophy is essentially homesickness: a longing for everywhere. In that sense, my homesickness embraces the whole world.
He lives in Kaiwaka and exhibits internationally. He absolved residencies in many countries, studied Literature and Art History at the University of Zurich and taught among others at Purdue University. His work is exhibited and shown in public and private collections. He was a judge at Wallace Art Trust competitions.