Fiona Kerr Gedson is a fibre artist who has used feathers as her primary medium for more than 25 years. She works from her home near Ōpōtiki, in the Eastern Bay of Plenty, Aotearoa NZ.

Fiona’s meticulously crafted, intricately designed feather pieces have a calming and meditative presence. Her work reflects and honours the things most important to her – her family, her spirituality, shared experiences, life stages and a sense of kotahitanga (unity).

Her most recent collection, Pilgrimage, is the embodiment of this. Inspired by walking the Camino de Santiago – completing 1500km over 8 1/2 weeks, this series responds to the many stained glass windows found in chapels and cathedrals on Fiona's remarkable life changing hikoi, which she undertook in 2022.

In this episode we have a beautiful conversation about walking the Camino and how this has consequently influenced her art practice. Fiona shares a personal experience of losing her precious father 3 weeks in to the pilgrimage and how she managed to process and manage her initial grief and keep walking. We discuss another influence in her practice, her work with Family Constellations (a method of family therapy or systemic therapy), and how this has also informed her practice.

Fiona shares how she started working with feathers in her early twenties; how she sources the peacock, turkey, guinea fowl and hen feathers; her positive long term connections with galleries; her meticulous creative process; her framing approach and the meditative aspects of pattern. And so much more.

You can see the uncut video of our conversation on our You Tube channel Creative Connections Podcast. I'd love you to subscribe!

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Lucy Eglington is a painter originally from the UK who immigrated to Aotearoa in 2003. She works from her home studio in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland.

Working primarily in oils, Lucy’s paintings explore human states of mind: dreams, successes, losses, grief and love and the narratives we tell ourselves. She often uses animals to represent ideas and feelings and to add individual narratives to each work.

With a successful track record of sell-out shows and recognition in prestigious art awards, her works resonate with audiences around the world.

In this episode we have a gorgeous chat about the ideology behind Lucy's work, the way she uses animals in her work and what they represent to her, what she is communicating through her work, how she wants the viewer to reflect on through her work, her love of portraiture, her creative process from sketching and note taking to filing her ideas and her painting approach.

We have an uncut video of this chat which will be available soon on our You Tube channel, which is currently under development. This will contain images of the work we are talking about and could be a fantastic resource for art teachers, artists and interested creatives, and for people who just love to watch instead of listen.

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Alexandra Tylee is a painter living in Poukawa in the Hawkes Bay. From her early twenties until her early forties Alexandra setup and ran 2 successful businesses, Fuel espresso in Wellington and Pipi Cafe in Havelock North. She has also written 3 cookbooks and an award winning children’s fiction book called If I Was A Banana.

Alexandra started painting around 5 years ago. Selling Pipi cafe in 2023 allowed her to devote herself more to her painting practice and since then she has had two sell out exhibitions at Muse Galley in Havelock North.

In this episode we talk about her passion for cooking and how it intertwines and connects with her love of painting, feelings, memories, stories and the still life paintings she likes to paint. We discuss how she sees running a business as a creative outlet and her approach to working in hospitality, how she feels now she has sold her business and has finally got time to devote to paintings, the painting lessons she had with NZ artist Helen Kerridge and why that felt important for her to do.

Alexandra shares how she choose the objects for her still life works, what they mean to her and what they communicate, the way she sets up a composition that reflects the way she sees things, how she combines different elements and objects in her own unique way and how her paintings create stillness. We also talk about the 4 books she has written and her love of writing despite being dyslexic - I've included the video of Alexandra reading her children's book at the bottom of her blogpost.

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Learn more about Creative Connections and see images of each guests work and relevant links on our blog