Congratulations to Tauranga artist Shona Mackenzie!

Shona's work ‘Heart’s Content’  was awarded the third Regional Finalist of the prestigious STUFF Art Aotearoa Gold Award for Art Excellence at The Auckland Art Show!

Shona Mackenzie is one of four finalists who are being progressively selected and announced at each of our 2024 Art Shows throughout the art show exhibition year - with the ultimate WINNER being selected after the final 2024 Show in Queenstown in October.

Shona is a multimedia artist, having lived in New Zealand for most of her life. As a habitual visual collector, Shona subconsciously looks for and gathers those special and fleeting moments found in nature. It could be the movement of the breeze through a field or the dawn mist hugging a forest, but the essence of what she sees is savoured and stored. In time, these images reappear unbidden in her art.

Unsurprisingly much of Shona’s work is landscape based. During her time living in Scotland as a young adult, Shona loved to reconnect with her extended family, culture and learning about the wild landscape of the Scottish West Coast. Her deep connection with the land is parallelled in both countries. Through this lens she explores long forgotten memories, what it means to call two countries home and generational echoes of emotion.

Predominantly a semi-abstract, process driven, mixed media, landscape artist, Shona paints intuitively.  She rarely has a firm idea of how a work will resolve before she starts. Her works on canvas are recognisable for their expressive mark-making and rich layers of translucent acrylic. When working on paper Shona incorporates collage, her own monotype prints and a wealth of texture.