Bronwyn Blair

Country: New Zealand
Artist Discipline: Pottery / Ceramics, Textile / Weaving, Writing, Other

For Bronwyn Blair, the Driving Creek residency represents a rare and deeply meaningful pause — an opportunity to step away from the demands of daily life and fully reconnect with creativity. After years of community-focused work and an extremely busy pre-Covid life, Bronwyn’s capacity to engage in art was further challenged by a prolonged and severe experience of long Covid. As her health has gradually improved, she has begun reclaiming time for creative exploration, discovering just how vital this reconnection has been to her wellbeing.

Raised in a household that valued craft — particularly the traditions of stitchery, costume-making, and textile work passed down through generations of women — Bronwyn’s creative path has been shaped by persistence and self-determination. Despite early barriers to formally pursuing art, she has continually returned to making, working across drawing, printing, writing, fabric design, and more recently ceramics. Her practice reflects a lifelong belief that learning is never static, and that forging one’s own creative path is essential.

During her residency, Bronwyn is seeking time, space, and immersion. She hopes to think, explore, dream, and make — without pressure or distraction — allowing reflective and exploratory practices to guide her process. Surrounded by Driving Creek’s landscape and creative energy, this residency will support personal development, nourish curiosity, and reignite the creative momentum that has always been part of her journey.

Tom Henry

Country: United States
Artist Discipline: Painting, Drawing / Illustration, Mixed Media
Instagram: @nightflight_to_venus
Website: www.thomasalexanderhenry.com

Tom Henry is an artist from Pōneke Wellington, currently based in New York City, whose practice spans painting, drawing, printmaking, and hand-painted wallpaper. His work often centres the overlooked role of the decorative artist, drawing inspiration from daily life, archives, and vintage publications to reimagine familiar subjects such as flowers and landscapes.

Attracted to Driving Creek by its history, spirit of experimentation, and extraordinary natural environment, Tom sees the residency as a chance to honour Barry Brickell’s legacy through material exploration. During his time on site, he plans to make his first serious foray into ceramics, creating decorative ceramic tiles inspired directly by the landscape and atmosphere of Driving Creek. He will bring his painterly sensibility to clay, applying techniques and visual language developed through years of working on paper with ink, chalk pastel, and unconventional surfaces.

Alongside ceramic work, Tom will also spend time painting en plein air, continuing his exploration of traditional and non-traditional materials. His embrace of cheap, everyday surfaces — from paper towels to sandpaper — reflects an ongoing interest in flatness, mass production, beauty, and decay. At Driving Creek, these investigations will be enriched by place, resulting in works that sit between the decorative and the disposable, the familiar and the contemporary.

Giulia Scott

Country: New Caledonia
Artist Discipline: Other

Giulia Scott is an art conservator currently working full-time in Auckland, a role that has limited the time she can dedicate to her own artistic practice. Her residency at Driving Creek offers a rare opportunity to refocus on personal work and to develop new pieces that more deeply reflect her New Zealand identity and lived experience.

Giulia’s creative foundations were shaped early in life through watching her parents restore historic churches throughout Italy. This immersion in craft, material knowledge, and cultural heritage left a profound impression, and relocating to New Zealand initially felt like a disconnection from this formative influence. Relearning the traditional scagliola technique during a return to Italy — under the guidance of a master artisan — allowed her to reconnect with both her heritage and a deeply personal material language.

During her residency, Giulia hopes to explore how landscape, culture, and contemporary New Zealand perspectives can inform her work, while continuing a dialogue with traditional techniques. Driving Creek’s environment offers the space to reflect, experiment, and integrate heritage craft with a modern voice — celebrating continuity, adaptation, and place.

Peter Quin

Country: New Zealand
Artist Discipline: Pottery / Ceramics

Peter Quin (Ngāti Pākehā, Ahuriri) lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara and has been working with clay for the past four years. His practice centres on the creation of taonga pūoro — traditional Māori musical instruments — crafted from clay and deeply informed by whenua, storytelling, and sound.

During his time at Driving Creek, Peter aims to deepen his exploration of form, function, and voice within these instruments. Working with natural clays, locally sourced materials, and earth-based pigments, he will experiment with carving, firing techniques, and glaze development to refine both sound quality and sculptural presence. Each piece is approached as a journey — shaped by hand, material, and environment.

Immersed in Driving Creek’s unique landscape and creative community, Peter hopes to develop a body of playable works that honour traditional knowledge while allowing room for personal interpretation. All of his taonga are gifted into the community, continuing a cycle of sharing, learning, and connection that sits at the heart of his practice.

Glenn Benmayor

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

Creativity has been a constant thread throughout Glenn Benmayor’s life — from building a mudbrick house in the 1990s to designing and making furniture and large, expressive concrete garden vessels. Inspired by Hundertwasser and the philosophy of Wabi Sabi, Glenn’s work embraces imperfection, material honesty, and playful form.

Recently relocated to the Coromandel, Glenn has been studying ceramics under Kay Ogilvie and Dave Austin, including raku firing techniques. His residency at Driving Creek offers the opportunity to further expand his ceramic knowledge, particularly around firing and glazing, while learning alongside fellow artists.

During his time on site, Glenn hopes to explore larger-scale ceramic works and experiment with merging metal craft and clay. Driving Creek’s collaborative environment and long-standing ceramic legacy provide the ideal setting for experimentation, exchange, and growth.

Grace Uivel

Country: New Zealand
Artist Discipline: Pottery / Ceramics
Instagram: @grace.uivel.ceramics
Website: www.ataceramics.nz

Grace Uivel is a potter based in Ōhinehou, working from her studio and shop Ata Ceramics. Her practice balances strong technical craftsmanship with an experimental approach to materials, incorporating found and foraged ash, stone, silt, and clay to create surfaces that speak of geological time, weathering, and resilience.

Returning to Driving Creek, Grace plans to focus on creating larger-scale works based on her recent forms — Yielding, Longing, and Hollow. With limited space at her home studio, the residency offers a rare chance to work at a scale not otherwise possible, allowing time and freedom to explore new techniques for scaling up.

Inspired by the many large ceramic sculptures throughout Driving Creek, particularly those by Barry Brickell, Grace hopes to study these works closely and learn from the techniques embedded within them. Her most recent explorations of softness, hollows, and inward energy will be deepened through this immersive engagement with place and collection.

Phoebe Ryder

Country: New Zealand
Artist Discipline: Pottery / Ceramics
Instagram: @phoebeperhaps

Phoebe Ryder lives and works in Ōtepoti Dunedin. With a background in fashion and textiles, she began working with clay in 2021 and was immediately drawn to its unpredictability, surface texture, and the visible evidence of the hand.

Her practice moves intuitively between hand-building and wheel throwing, creating both functional and non-functional works influenced by memories of landscapes, patterns, ancient ceramic forms, and textiles. During her residency at Driving Creek, Phoebe is seeking dedicated time and space to make — free from external pressures.

The residency offers an opportunity to explore new ideas, push scale, and allow process to lead. Surrounded by Driving Creek’s environment and creative rhythm, Phoebe hopes to develop work that reflects curiosity, material response, and quiet experimentation.

Henry Turner

Country: Germany
Artist Discipline: Pottery / Ceramics, Sculpture / Carving, Painting, Drawing / Illustration, Multimedia, Textile / Weaving, Writing

Henry Turner (b. 2000, Ōtautahi) is currently based in Frankfurt, where he studies at Städelschule and represents Society of Four Stars. A prolific and interdisciplinary artist, Henry describes Driving Creek as one of the richest environments for making and drawing he has ever encountered.

Returning for a shorter January residency, Henry arrives with an expansive set of ideas — from experimenting with Coromandel gold bole for gilding, to producing scagliola, clay-slip panels, kiln-fired photographic and drawing processes, and thousands of small ceramic figures. His work thrives on material testing, risk, and transformation.

While time constraints require selectivity, Henry hopes to dive deeper into kiln processes, surface experimentation, and drawing, using Driving Creek as both studio and catalyst. His residency continues an ongoing relationship with the site as a place of excess, curiosity, and relentless making.

Naomi Allan

Country: New Zealand
Artist Discipline: Pottery / Ceramics
Instagram: @Namzeedidit

Naomi Allan is a Tāmaki Makaurau-based ceramicist, second-hand shopper, and dedicated hot beverage drinker. A self-confessed potter’s wheel enthusiast, Naomi’s practice is driven by a love of throwing and a desire to spend as much time as possible immersed in clay.

Awarded the Driving Creek residency through Auckland Studio Potters’ Fire and Clay competition, Naomi sees this opportunity as both an escape from city life and a chance to fully absorb the beauty and rhythm of Driving Creek. Alongside her ceramic practice, she works in her family’s restaurant, Ima Cuisine, and draws narrative inspiration from horror and science fiction.

During her residency, Naomi plans to further explore surface and texture, including experimenting with decals printed from her own drawings. These layered narratives and visual textures continue to inform vessels that act as quiet homages to lived experience, storytelling, and material play.