Re:Tale brings together a group of contemporary object makers working across ceramics, jewellery, installation, and design, to explore the dual meanings of “retail” and “re-telling”. Developed through the Object Maker Fellowship programme, the exhibition extends from the earlier project Re:Object (Depot Artspace 2025), expanding the focus from objects to the narratives, environments and systems that produce and sustain them.

Re:Tale creates a space where personal histories, cultural memory, and material processes intersect with the systems of production and exchange that define contemporary life. Throughout the exhibition, artists draw on their own backgrounds and disciplines, engaging with migration, identity, spirituality, and domestic rituals - while also acknowledging their position within the conditions of consumer culture, rather than outside it.

Materials carry much of this enquiry: Discarded fragments are reworked into jewellery that questions value and permanence. Plaster, clay, and found objects become vessels for memory, belief, and belonging. Industrial and crafted forms sit alongside one another, exposing tensions between durability and disposability. In some works, humour and play disrupt expectations; in others, restraint and repetition allow meaning to emerge gradually.

Rather than offering a singular position, Re:Tale holds varied approaches in play, allowing contradiction to co-exist. It asks what it means to continue making objects within systems shaped by overproduction, and convenience and whether acts of making can also become acts of reflection, resistance and change.

SARAH ZIESSEN

SARAH ZIESSEN

SARAH ZIESSEN

shino leaf jug

SARAH ZIESSEN

Rotorua

New Zealand