He Kanohi Kitea Exposure Exhibition 2025, Toi Rauwhārangi College of Creative Arts, Massey University Wellington
He Kanohi Kitea Exposure celebrates the creative talents of the next generation of artists, designers, musicians, and media makers from across Toi Rauwhārangi College of Creative Arts Massey University—Aotearoa’s largest and most diverse creative arts school, including multiple design disciplines, fine arts, and screen arts. Final-year projects from across the whole college will be on display, across three buildings.
This year’s exhibition brand identity was created in our revitalised printmaking studio, relocated in 2025 to its new home at the heart of the Pukeahu campus, overlooking Te Rau Karamu Marae. The identity system—developed by Visual Communication Design students Taryn Smith, Yana Kulishenko, and Martin Tran—uses rubbings taken directly from the three buildings in which the works are displayed (and where the hard mahi to develop the student projects on display took place!). This approach grounds the exhibition in place and materiality, celebrating experiential processes, the tactile, and the authentic.
For the first time, we proudly showcase work from our new three-year Bachelor of Design degree, exhibited alongside outcomes from our flagship Honours degrees and Master of Design and Master of Fine Arts programmes.
The work presented is process-led, engaging with social and environmental issues, and exploring themes of identity, belonging, challenge, and connection. Each outcome represents an authentic, thoughtful response: design as a means of inquiry, empathy, and action.
Expect hands-on craft and refined digital outcomes; multi-touchpoint projects that connect people, ideas, and places; and creative solutions that confront societal challenges, large and small.
Design majors on exhibition include:
- Integrated Design
- Visual Communication Design
- Spatial Design
- Concept Design
- Textile Design
- Fashion Design
- Industrial Design
Public opening: 8–21 November 2025, 10am–4pm
Design Community Night (for industry/alumni): Tuesday 11 November: register at 2025designcommunity.eventbrite.co.nz
Location: Toi Rauwhārangi College of Creative Arts, Massey University, Buildings 1, 2 and 12, Massey University Entrance C, Wallace Street, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington
This year’s He Kanohi Kitea Exposure promises to be the largest yet. We’re proud to see students tackling important issues, with responses driven by research and design processes that are thoughtful, empathetic, and attentive to audience needs. It’s much deeper than eye candy—though there’s plenty to delight on an aesthetic level too!
We’re also excited to launch the latest Exposure website: exposure2025.massey.ac.nz. This digital showcase of graduating work serves as a fabulous annual yearbook of all our amazing final-year project mahi.
— Dr Jo Bailey, co-lead, Visual Communication Design, Ngā Pae Māhutonga / Wellington School of Design
Students:
Lisa Dao
With My Little Eye is an installation, online experience, and physical card game that invites young explorers to peek into the fascinating world of aquatic microfauna. At a gallery-based exhibition, children and their parents are immersed in a universe of microscopic creatures and ephemera. Tasked with locating these critters using a set of physical creature cards, participants scan the creatures scattered across suspended cloth screens to uncover facts, game stats, and special power moves on an interactive website. Through the process of matching the creatures on their cards, they engage in a large-scale game of I Spy—revealing the wonders of our diverse ecology and inspiring a closer look at the natural world around us.
BDes (hons) Visual Communication Design
https://exposure2025.massey.ac.nz/students/visual-communication/Lisa-Dao
Ruby Ross-Hayes
Designed Dissent celebrates Aotearoa’s nuclear-free movement through the ephemera it left behind. Through editorial design, it weaves the visual language of protest with the historical context, highlighting the role of design in activism. Bright and colourful design, interviews with designers and activists, and a call to create new protest ephemera connect the past movement with the present, inspiring young designers to see protest as powerful and relevant today.
BDes (hons) Visual Communication Design
https://exposure2025.massey.ac.nz/students/visual-communication/Ruby-Ross-Hayes
Yana Kulishenko
Нитка, Що Єднає / Through Our Thread is a multi-touchpoint cultural experience that builds empathy through active engagement with the symbolism of traditional Ukrainian embroidery. Rooted in the Tree of Life motif, the project weaves visual, material and narrative storytelling to connect past, present and future. It illuminates Ukrainian history while amplifying contemporary voices, revealing a side of Ukraine beyond news headlines and inviting audiences to discover the country’s resilient cultural heritage.
A two-part installation is the heart of the project. The first part acknowledges tradition by presenting digital replicas of traditional embroidery (rushnyky) as a visual language. The second part shows contemporary footage filmed in Ukraine, animated as if embroidered digitally, revealing Ukrainian culture as living, not frozen in history. This experience is accompanied by a musical score that samples tsymbaly and Ukrainian birdsong.
A take-home book featuring illustrations adapted from Ukrainian embroidery patterns complements the installation. It follows the Tree of Life framework, first providing written narratives to accompany the traditional embroidery from the installation, then placing the embroidery within a contemporary, real-life context through interviews with Ukrainian women from around the globe. The final ‘Seeds of the Future’ chapter invites cultural understanding through time and attention as readers are encouraged to embroider one of the provided perforated cards themselves. These embroidered cards are designed to be gifted, turning the audience into cultural ambassadors, disseminating the seeds through their networks.
BDes (hons) Visual Communication Design
https://exposure2025.massey.ac.nz/students/visual-communication/Yana-Kulishenko
Connor Lynd
Grit explores the intersection of Kiwi masculinity and men’s mental health in Aotearoa. Central to the project is a three-part video series that both challenges and celebrates manhood in all its diverse forms, following different Kiwi men as they share what it means to be a man today—and what it might mean for future generations. By showcasing a range of perspectives and experiences, Grit broadens the definition of masculinity, moving beyond narrow ideals of toughness and emotional restraint. Through the videos, accompanying campaign, and supporting website, the project seeks to dissolve the stigma embedded in stoic ‘man alone’ myths, shifting the conversation from silence and isolation toward openness, vulnerability, and genuine connection.
BDes (hons) Visual Communication Design
exposure2025.massey.ac.nz/students/visual-communication/connor-lynd
Sarina Oetgen
Anthrotype: Imprint of a human investigates the complexities of designing for a post-human Aotearoa. It interrogates the relationship between myself, a Pākehā designer, and the whenua, through material-based making practices. Each toolkit connects a way of making with a location, through a material found there. Through engaging with introduced materials, this project highlights the impacts of human activity on natural landscapes. These tools unleash potential for creativity and environmental restoration.
BDes (hons) Integrated Design (photography + industrial)
exposure2025.massey.ac.nz/students/integrated/sarina-oetgen
Thomas Cumming
What Is It, If It Is Not This? explores the landscape of artists’ books and my position within it as a book designer engaged in experimental publication design.
The term artists’ book refers to the book’s format and structure as a site of artistic expression rather than solely as a vessel for written content. However, there is a significant dissonance regarding the terminology used to describe such work. To test the boundaries of this practice, I created a series of ‘bookworks’ that explore, subvert, and embrace its possibilities.
Through an auto-ethnographic design practice, my research foregrounds my values and experiences as a designer. It reframes design from a pragmatic act into a self-reflexive one. Iterative, practice-led methods—aligned with the playful constraints of Oulipo, the French literary movement known for its structural experimentation—shaped a responsive and intuitive creative process. The sixteenth-century cabinet of curiosities provided a conceptual framework. It informed my exploration of taxonomies, intermedia tendencies, and personal sense-making.
The resulting ‘bookworks’ include Of Nine, inspired by zine culture, which presents democratic multiples that play with juxtaposition and synthesis. Knot A Book investigates materiality and non-linear narrative, responding to Dieter Roth’s idea that ‘a book is a knot.’ This Number is a Sentence critiques publishing conventions through manipulation of ISBN data. The project concludes with two proposed terms—embodied book design and holistic book design—to describe immersive, materially engaged approaches to artistic bookmaking.
This project won a gold DINZ Best Award in October.
MDes Visual Communication Design
https://exposure2025.massey.ac.nz/students/master-of-design/thomas-cumming
Chelsea Seybold
Healthwash is an educational campaign that familiarises young adults on healthwashing: when brands use misleading language and imagery to make food products appear healthier than they are. The project exposes these deceptive marketing tactics through an interactive web experience centred on a parody quiz show. Using humour and design, Healthwash empowers users to critically analyse, recognise, and question misleading marketing in everyday food products.
BDes (hons) Visual Communication Design
exposure2025.massey.ac.nz/students/visual-communication/chelsea-seybold
Ren Hartley
The Halcyon explores puppetry as a bridge between memory and material reality. The project examines how puppets can embody comfort, grief, and imagination. Through digital painting, theatrical stagecraft, and fabricated creatures like Sundog, I built a world that visualises remembrance as performance. The project combines theory and craft to celebrate creative artifice and to question what it means to give life to inanimate matter.
BDes (hons) Concept Design
exposure2025.massey.ac.nz/students/concept/ren-hartley
Rachael Mueller
OPTIC is a conceptual collection that explores how neoliberal and postfeminist ideals have fostered a culture of self-surveillance, objectification, and competition. These systems limit the agency and autonomy of women and marginalised groups. Inspired by Foucault’s interpretation of Bentham’s Panopticon, the project looks at how surveillance has become encouraged to be internalised, turning us into both the watcher and the watched in the digital age.
Influenced by Ai Weiwei’s Weiweicam.com and Sophie Calle’s The Shadow, I documented my own life through self-surveillance photography during the making of this collection. These images became prints and motifs, with recurring eyes and linear structures that reflect the architecture of the Panopticon and its structure of control through visibility.
Historical garments like the USSR ghillie suit, bedroll, and Japanese float vest combine beautifully with organic tree-root forms and repeated eye motifs. They symbolise resistance and collective strength needed within systems of control to reclaim agency. Using processes such as image transferring, crocheting, and felting, OPTIC blends structure and softness, visibility and disguise.
My collection aims to transform self-surveillance into self-awareness, to reclaim agency through material manipulations, prints, and processes, inviting reflection and collective change.
BDes (hons) Fashion Design
https://exposure2025.massey.ac.nz/students/fashion/Rachael-Mueller
Fiona Peng
Where I go, Fabric goes sought to find the intersection between animation and textiles that is both tangible and digital. Inspired by drawing childhood cartoons, it aimed to honour the two facets of my creative practice and combine them into one. The result is a minute-long animated short film narrating a girl being carried through textile universes.
BDes (hons) Visual Textile Design
https://exposure2025.massey.ac.nz/students/textile/Fiona-Peng
Tiara Malota
Ahi kā responds to the presence of Māori and Moana communities that heavily shape the suburb, Māngere in Tāmaki Makaurau, a presence ignited by its people and activated across dynamic shifts of vā. This research seeks to enhance embodied reflections of Māngere, a place of connectivity and relational grounding.
The project addresses the importance of community and whānau gatherings and how it can influence a paradigm shift that centres people in cultural spaces. Drawing on Te Ao Māori and Moana values to examine how spaces could become multi-functional to support changes shaped by the interactions of bodies with te taiao, people and time, to reflect cultural and spatial sensibilities. The design becomes responsive to the charged space held by people, to support a dynamic facilitation style. It considers how design might move beyond form, towards methods that create inclusive, intergenerational spaces of belonging, learning, growth and celebration, while strengthening cultural identity and enabling individuals to stand with confidence in their own tūrangawaewae.
BDes (hons) Spatial Design
https://exposure2025.massey.ac.nz/students/spatial/tiara-malota
8–21 November 2025
Toi Rauwhārangi College of Creative Arts
Dates:
8–21 November 2025, open to the public 10am–4pm
Design Community Night (for industry/alumni): Tuesday 11 November
Toi Rauwhārangi / College of Creative Arts
Massey University Buildings 1, 2 and 12, Massey University Entrance C, Wallace Street, Wellington
Disciplines:
Design (Visual Communication; Spatial; Industrial; Textiles; Fashion; Concept; Integrated); Fine Arts; Screen Arts; Commercial Music. Exposure is an annual exhibition that celebrates the creative talents of the next generation of artists, designers, musicians, and media makers as they take their first step into their creative careers.
