Introducing our Deepen* artists

We are excited to introduce the six artists who have been working to make the Deepen* kaupapa a reality. Last week we introduced Deepen*, a curatorial programme highlighting queer, disabled artists and their artistry. It celebrates that we have always been here, in our communities and in relationships.

Our artists have been working on a collection of activations, recorded kōrero, spoken poetry and photo essays which explore how queerness and disability intersect, acknowledging that queer spaces are not always accessible.

Misty Frequency (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngā Rauru, Kai Tahu, Scotland) is a Takatāpui, neurodivergent, genderless visual, performance and drag artist and activist. The kaupapa they bring you is political, conceptual and avant-garde, ultimately with the aim to advocate, celebrate, demonstrate, captivate and stimulate.

My name is Noēll Ratapu. I am a 25-year-old Queer, Māori, Disabled woman artist living in Southern California to receive life-saving treatment for my degenerative disability called Spinal Muscular Atrophy. I lost the ability to walk at age 11 and have been in a wheelchair ever since. My art depicts a variety of different styles, but mainly abstract and self-portraits. Art in any medium has given me the ability to transcend into a different reality. Creating art has become a huge sense of freedom that has carried me through this life and has kept me afloat even when I felt as if I was sinking. For the past four years, I started my digital art journey since my hands are now too weak for painting and drawing. It allowed me to explore more of my creativity without feeling burnt out from exhaustion and has lit a stronger and brighter fire of passion underneath me.

Ruby Solly (Kāi Tahu, Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe) is a taonga pūoro practitioner, writer, musician, and music therapist, living in Poneke which is also the title of her first album. She has published two books with Te Herenga Waka University Press; Tōku Pāpā (2020) and The Artist (2024). She has been published in various Aotearoa based journals as well as in America, Australia, and Antarctica. She has recently completed a doctoral thesis within public health at Massey University, on the use of taonga pūoro for hauora. She tries hard to be a compassionate friend of her bipolar disorder.

Henrietta Bollinger (they/them) is a writer and disabled community advocate and writer in many forms. They  have been performing poetry since 2009 and  their most recent work has been essays. Their first book Articulations was published by Tender Press in 2023. It is about their experiences as a disabled-queer person and a twin.

A recent transplant to Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Ari Kerssens, 29, seeks to create unity and spread disabled joy through his advocacy work and creative practice. Ari became blind in 2013, and after confronting his own internalised ableism in the years that followed has gone through a radical shift in his perceptions and beliefs; and landed in a place of blind pride. You can usually find Ari socialising, exploring, practising yoga, collecting weird sounds, or creating - primarily in the medium of sound. Ari’s latest work 4 Feet in the Dark, in collaboration with Tash van Schaardenburg, opens in Tāmaki Makaurau on January 31st.

Dr Huhana Hickey (MNZM) from Ngāti Tāhinga, Whakatōhea is an academic and disability rights lawyer. She has multiple sclerosis, was the first openly disabled Housing NZ board member and is an unflinching advocate for whānau hauā and all disabled people. Dr Hickey is a member of the New Zealand Human Rights Review Tribunal and became a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2015 for services to people with disabilities.