Presenter: Janet Mazenier
Title: Pursuing creativity as a profession following a corporate career
Abstract: Currently a PhD (Creative Practice) candidate at AUT, Janet will finish her study in May 2026. Retiring in 2012, she has transitioned to working and studying fulltime as a professional artist. Her artistic practice has consolidated into a sustained and rigorous investigation of materiality, place, and temporal depth. Working predominantly with abstraction, her recent work foregrounds dense, stratified surfaces that register processes of accumulation, erosion, and emergence. Engaging with the wider international art community in Ireland and Iceland as well as in Aotearoa New Zealand, she has led collaborations, exhibitions and established collective practices. She is a connector and enjoys teaching and mentoring, seeing people respond to the power of art and how it can support their lives.
Since embracing her art practice fulltime, she now articulates painting as a form of knowledge production, one that bridges lived experience, material process, and conceptual reflection. Her practice thus stands as an example of how diverse professional histories can meaningfully inform lifelong learning.
Date:
Monday 20 July
This session will run from 10:00 am - 12:00 pm and include a tea / coffee break.
About the expert
Janet Mazenier
Janet Mazenier is a contemporary visual artist whose practice engages with place, time, affect, world-bending, and materiality. Her drawn paintings are characterised by texturally rich, excavated, and striated surfaces that evoke ancientness, the hidden, the unseen, and the ephemeral.
In 2025, she led an international collective called Meitheal (an Irish term for people who support each other to bring in the harvest)—a collaboration born of time spent at the Burren College of Art in County Clare, Ireland. The collective includes world-building-bending women from Scotland, Spain, the United States, Ireland, and Aotearoa New Zealand. The collective's work, Faultlines, was exhibited at the Sluice World Building exhibition in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland, in May, with a focus on inclusivity, art-making, and shared joy.
Janet works from two studios in Te Hau Kapua Devonport – one at her home, and the other as part of the Studio D3 artists collective at Depot Artspace. Her works are held in private and public collections, including tertiary institutions, across Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally.
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