We are thrilled to announce Fleur Wickes as our Artist in Residence for 2026.

Established in 1999, Marsden’s Artist in Residence Programme gives Visual Art students the opportunity to experience the working process of a practising artist by working alongside them. Each year, we select an emerging or established artist from New Zealand or Australia working across disciplines including painting, printmaking, sculpture, photography and design.

Fleur Wickes is a New Zealand artist who has been making art since 1989. Her multidisciplinary practice spans drawing, painting, photography and text, using pared-back language and bold visual form to explore universal experiences of tenderness, grief, joy, love and resilience from a distinctly personal perspective.

After studying professional photography at what is now Massey University Wellington, Fleur built a successful two-decade career as a portrait photographer. Alongside this, she wrote short stories and poetry, with work published in respected literary journals and featured in national anthologies. In 2008, she began drawing the words she was writing, allowing language itself to become an emotional landscape — a pivotal shift that established the distinctive integration of text and image that defines her work today.

Her critically acclaimed exhibition This Is Where I Live transformed her own home into a self-portrait in word, object and image, establishing a format she has returned to repeatedly: presenting work within environments that either are, or feel like they are, domestic. Fleur has exhibited widely throughout Aotearoa, including a solo exhibition Let It All Come Undone at Te Manawa Museum of Art and Science in Palmerston North. Her work is held in private collections across New Zealand and internationally.

More recently, in 2025, Fleur collaborated with Phantom Billstickers on a high-profile street campaign featuring her work It’s beautiful here.

Her text-based artwork We share the same sky you and I was also featured on a prominent Cuba Street billboard, fulfilling a long-held ambition to take her deeply personal work beyond galleries and into public space.

Reflecting on her approach, Fleur describes her work as grounded in deeply personal emotional inquiry, investigating internal worlds through mark-making and paint. Her art seeks to communicate lived experience through a visual language where words and images are felt as much as they are read.

Kathryn Cotter, Marsden’s Head of Visual Art, says the residency programme provides a valuable opportunity for students to engage directly with contemporary artistic practice.

“We are delighted to welcome Fleur to Marsden as our 2026 Artist in Residence. Her work is thoughtful and conceptually rich, and her multidisciplinary approach will offer our students a powerful insight into the creative process.”

We offer our Artist in Residence a stipend, dedicated studio workspace and opportunities to work alongside students through workshops and critiques. Fleur’s residency will run for six weeks, beginning on Monday 16 March. At the conclusion of the residency, an exhibition of work created during her time at Marsden will be presented at a Wellington gallery.

The programme also extends beyond the school community. As part of the residency, Fleur will lead a special workshop for local primary school students on 1 May, sharing her creative practice with young learners from across the Wellington region.

For Marsden’s Visual Art students, the residency provides a rare opportunity to observe the creative process up close, from early experimentation and idea development through to the completion and exhibition of new work. Working alongside a practising artist encourages students to think deeply about their own artistic work and see how creative ideas evolve in a professional context.

Over more than two decades, Marsden’s Artist in Residence Programme has welcomed a prestigious list of artists, building a legacy of creative exchange and artistic excellence within the school. Fleur’s residency will continue this tradition, giving Marsden students the opportunity to learn from an artist whose work explores the emotional landscapes of everyday life through text, image and bold visual form.