Artist Floor Talk: Eve Kireka and Akiko Diegel

Eve Kireka will be speaking about her exhibition, Ahokore Ahikaaroa: Keeping the home fires burning and Akiko Diegel will be speaking to her exhibition, lost, lost property.

Eve Kireka (Rongomaiwahine, Tamatakutai, Ngāti Kahungunu) 
Eve is a multi-disciplinary and multi-media creative practitioner. She works within traditional Māori and contemporary realms, simultaneously acknowledging both worlds in her art practice by utilising earthly and contemporary materials and processes to investigate and reference environmental changes caused by human innovation and social activity. 

Eve is a 2018 Master of Professional Creative Practice graduate from Te Kura Ahu Taonga IDEAschool at the Eastern Institute of Technology, currently studying Māori and Indigenous Visual Art at Toimairangi (Māori Visual Art School) at Te Wānanga O Aotearoa, in Hastings.  

Akiko Diegel
Akiko's artwork deals with the realisation of existence: Things that are consumed, worn, worked, worried, carried, forgotten, collected, things that used as comforts and things used as crutches. Acts of collecting, recording, constructing, stitching, knitting, drawing are utilised and examined in her practice, balancing the works between addressing the corporeal and the behavioural sides of being a person. Her practice record of human problems: of an ambivalence towards boundaries, of the line crossed between a comfort and a crutch, of mole-hills turned to mountains, of the vague anxieties and niggling problem associated with comprehending and surviving existence.