Laura Pascoe

Country: Australia
Artist Discipline: Pottery / Ceramics, Sculpture / Carving, Painting
Instagram: @la.pascoe
Website: https://www.laurapascoe.au/

Laura Pascoe is a Meanjin (Brisbane)-based ceramic artist, designer, and art curator with a background in architecture. Her practice sits at the intersection of making and community-building — shaped by years working across interior design, art selection, and ceramics, and through her co-direction of the artist-run initiative and gallery Vacant Assembly.

During her time at Driving Creek, Laura plans to work in close response to place. She intends to observe the natural environment and explore local materials, allowing their qualities to guide and redirect the work as it develops. Having never travelled to Aotearoa before, she is excited by the unknown — the way a different landscape, climate, and material language might shift her process and influence the final forms.

With a creative timeline spanning decades — painting since the 1990s, architecture practice since 2001, ceramics since 2013, and ARI leadership since 2018 — Laura arrives with a rich foundation of disciplines. The residency offers space to slow down, tune into the land, and build a new body of work shaped by discovery, material responsiveness, and experimentation.

Rosa Allison

Country: New Zealand
Artist Discipline: Painting, Drawing / Illustration
Instagram: @rosa_allison_

Rosa Allison is a painter and gardener based in Pōneke Wellington, working primarily with oil paint and a love for unexpected, slightly off-kilter colour combinations. Her paintings draw deeply from the logic of gardens — especially wild ones full of vines, rambling growth, and untamed energy — echoing memories of her grandmother’s garden overflowing with roses.

At Driving Creek, Rosa is hoping to strengthen the sense of community around her practice by living and working alongside other artists. She values environments where learning and teaching happen simultaneously, and sees collaboration as an ideal way to grow — through shared conversations, skills, and everyday studio exchange.

Long term, Rosa dreams of creating a shared studio space in Pōneke. While that vision is still in its early stages, she hopes the residency will offer practical inspiration and insight into what makes a shared creative community thrive. Recommended by former residents, Driving Creek feels like the right place to gather ideas — and to paint alongside a landscape that naturally invites both wildness and care.

Heather Tobe

Country: Canada
Artist Discipline: Pottery / Ceramics
Instagram: @bowlmeoverpottery/

Heather Tobe describes herself as a potter defined by play, exploration, and experimentation. Rather than working in production, she prefers to follow ideas as they emerge — making only a handful of pieces per concept, letting curiosity and the environment lead. For Heather, Driving Creek is the ideal setting: a small community, a strong collaborative culture, and a landscape rich with stories and textures.

During her residency, Heather aims to create work that reflects the region and her own sense of play. She is especially interested in exploring surface and material interaction — the dialogue between texture and clay, clay and glaze, and glaze layered over glaze across different firings. She also hopes to absorb ideas through collaboration, learning from both international residents and local makers, and contributing to the wider studio community.

With a professional background teaching interpersonal and intercultural communication, Heather is always looking for ways to integrate cultural diversity into her life and work. She is drawn to bowls — her favourite form — but intends to challenge herself by throwing for height, experimenting with new shapes, building texture, and working across different clay bodies and glaze types. Without a studio of her own at home, a full month in a dedicated space is a significant opportunity to deepen her practice and return to Canada with expanded confidence, knowledge, and creative momentum.

Rosemary “Rosie” Mason

Country: Australia
Artist Discipline: Pottery / Ceramics

Rosemary “Rosie” Mason is a ceramic artist based in Wellington Point, Queensland. Over the past decade she has developed a practice grounded in wheel-thrown forms that evolve into semi-functional sculptural objects — exploring the tension between utility and fragility, and the point where function begins to blur into failure. Her approach is shaped by personal memory, her Macedonian heritage, and the ceramic traditions of her mother’s homeland, alongside the experimental spirit of Bauhaus makers.

At Driving Creek, Rosie is keen to deepen her understanding of firing techniques, glaze technology, and traditional methods of making — particularly throwing on a kickwheel. She feels especially drawn to wood firing, and to the unpredictable, richly marked surfaces it can produce. More broadly, she hopes to explore pottery with less reliance on modern technology: slower, tactile processes, traditional tools, and hands-on learning that reconnects the body to the making.

Alongside technical learning, Rosie is interested in developing a sculptural assemblage project — bringing together altered wheel-thrown and hand-built components into larger forms. The residency offers her a chance to work in an intuitive, material-led way, and to explore how traditional processes might shift and expand the direction of her practice moving forward.

Duncan Sargent

Country: New Zealand
Artist Discipline: Pottery / Ceramics, Painting
Instagram: @trees_i_know

Duncan Sargent is a multi-disciplinary artist working across abstract painting, sculpture, and ceramics — a medium he has come to more recently. After three decades of making contemporary furniture, Duncan is now focusing fully on his art practice, exhibiting paintings, ceramics, sculpture, and collage over the past five years at spaces including Thistle Hall and Rice Pudding Gallery.

His time at Driving Creek is an opportunity to step away from everyday life and concentrate on the crossover between his ceramic work and painting practice. Duncan is interested in pushing both directions at once: creating more painterly ceramics, and more “ceramical” paintings — allowing each medium to borrow qualities from the other.

Having recently completed his first ceramics-only solo exhibition, “100 bowls – more or less”, Duncan arrives with strong momentum and a clear desire to keep evolving. The residency offers space for focused experimentation, new material approaches, and a deeper integration of surface, form, and gesture across disciplines.

Bernie Winkels

Country: New Zealand
Artist Discipline: Pottery / Ceramics, Sculpture / Carving, Painting, Multimedia
Instagram: @berniewinks
Website: www.berniewinkels.com

Bernie Winkels is a multimedia visual artist with over thirty years of practice. His work often engages with “the everyday” — responding to the systems we live within, the world around us, and his own relationship to land and environment. While ceramic tiles are an important part of his working life, Bernie’s wider art practice is driven by experimentation and by building themes over time, allowing ideas to expand and deepen through each new body of work.

At Driving Creek, Bernie plans to continue the direction of his most recent exhibition, developing a new series that explores how his painted imagery can be transformed into three-dimensional form. This shift from surface to object will involve testing techniques, reinterpreting motifs, and discovering how painting can be carried through clay, structure, and sculptural presence.

Bernie approaches making with a willingness to try new processes and push materials — valuing clay for its immediacy and for the way it connects him back to the earth. The residency offers him the time, tools, and environment to experiment boldly, grow the ideas from his last show, and evolve them into sculptural outcomes.

Glenn Benmayor

Country: New Zealand
Artist Discipline: Pottery / Ceramics, Sculpture / Carving
Instagram: @ben.moo.hah.artist

Creativity has been a constant throughout Glenn Benmayor’s life — from building a mudbrick house in the 1990s to designing and making furniture, and creating bold concrete garden pots inspired by Hundertwasser and the philosophy of Wabi Sabi. Recently relocated to the Coromandel, Glenn has been studying clay work with Kay Ogilvie and Dave Austin, including raku firing.

Glenn hopes Driving Creek will be both an enclave for focused making and a place of exchange, where he can learn alongside other artists while deepening his understanding of ceramics — especially firing and glazing. During the residency, he plans to experiment with larger-scale ceramic pieces and explore ways of merging his metal craft skills with clay, creating hybrid works that extend his practice into new territory.

With the legacy of experimentation at Driving Creek and a collaborative studio environment, Glenn’s time on site will support both learning and ambitious making — grounded in curiosity, material exploration, and community.