LOUIE ZALK-NEALE
artist

Te Tīmatanga: AKL Pride Residency
〉〉〉〉〉〉〉2025

For 2025, Auckland Pride is honoured to welcome Louie Zalk-Neale as the Te Tīmatanga resident for Tētahi Ki Tētahi with their project Mana Tipua Tuku Iho.

Throughout their residency, Zalk-Neale’s creative journey has been shaped and nurtured by the guidance of Neke Moa, a tuakana artist whose practice is grounded in the principles of hauora, using materials gifted by te taiao to weave together customary and contemporary processes. In Mana Tipua Tuku Iho, Zalk-Neale’s work explores how the intersections of gender, whakapapa, and environmental sustainability speak to the ways we, too, are shaped and reshaped through the course of our lives.

How do we grow, like the tī kōuka, into our full selves? How do we, like pounamu, slowly emerge from the roughness of the environments we may be formed in but ultimately become helped along by the creators in our lives who reveal our true beauty? And how do we, like driftwood, find meaning in the fluidity of our identity, our path never fixed but always transforming with the tide?

With guidance from Neke Moa, Zalk-Neale’s creative journey reflects the embodied knowing of Mana Tipua, exploring the transformative power of identity told in many stories of our Tīpuna, of our Taniwha, of our Kaitiaki, of our Atua. Together, they ask us to consider how our own processes of change—our own transfiguration—are intimately connected to the natural world around us, and how these transformations help us navigate, embrace, and celebrate our queer selves.

— Adapted from text by curator Hāmiora Bailey