We first came across Aroha Novak’s work the way most people in Dunedin do – sideways. A friend mentioned an installation at a decommissioned stadium. Someone else pointed out chalk writing on a footpath near the harbour. It took a while to realise the same person was behind both, which says something about the range of what she does and the quietness with which she does it.
Not the Kind of Artist You Can Pin Down
Sculpture Student, Then Everything Else
Aroha Novak came to Dunedin School of Art to study sculpture. She finished her BFA in 2007, then stuck around for an MFA – completed with Distinction in 2013, with an exchange semester in Prague wedged in the middle. On paper that sounds like a straightforward trajectory. In practice, it was anything but.
Novak is Ngai Te Rangi, Ngati Kahungunu, and Tuhoe, with Czech heritage in the mix – a combination that probably tells you something about the range of reference points she draws from. By the time she finished her postgraduate work, calling her a sculptor felt like describing the ocean as wet. The label wasn’t wrong, exactly, but it missed most of what was going on. She’d started letting the concept drive the medium, not the other way around, and that instinct hasn’t changed. Each new project is a fresh negotiation with materials, spaces, and communities. Sculpture was the door she walked through, but she hasn’t stayed in any one room since.
Sound, Textiles, Chalk on a Footpath
The list of things Novak works with reads like someone raided every department at the polytech: installation, embroidery, sound, photography, video, painting, writing, curation. But it’s not scattergun. Each project finds its own materials because each project asks a different question.
For MAURI-FY, a 2024 installation at The Physics Room in Christchurch, the answer was a floor-to-ceiling textile embroidered with kawakawa leaves – stitched from materials gathered from her studio, her garden, friends, and whanaunga. You entered through it like walking into something living. For An Unfinished Map of Maori Place Names in Otepoti, the answer was chalk. Just chalk on a footpath, writing indigenous place names along a bike route around the Otago Peninsula. Ten people. Modest materials. Marks that the rain would wash away within days. The impermanence was the point.
What connects the work isn’t a medium – it’s an insistence that the materials match the kaupapa. When the project is about healing and restoration, you make space for tea and rest. When the project is about reclaiming suppressed names, you write them where people walk.
Research as Raw Material
The Brook Project – Novak’s 2015 engagement with the old Carisbrook stadium site – didn’t begin with making anything. It began with two years of research. Historical documents, community conversations, oral histories of the neighbourhood. The installation and the event were the end of a long process, not the beginning.
This is how Novak works. Research isn’t the preparatory phase before the real art happens. Research is the art, or at least its engine. She’s drawn to histories that have been forgotten, suppressed, or simply never recorded in the places where official records are kept. Her decision to study Te Reo at Te Wananga o Aotearoa wasn’t a sideline – it was a direct extension of the practice, a tool for accessing knowledge that exists in the language rather than in archives. The work that eventually appears in a gallery or on a street corner carries the weight of that inquiry, even when the final form is as light as chalk or cloth.
The Work That Stays With You
Carisbrook, After the Wrecking Ball
The House of Pain. That’s what people called Carisbrook, and when the stadium was decommissioned and partially demolished, most of Dunedin moved on. Novak didn’t. She spent two years talking to people, digging through records, and sitting with the question of what a place like that means after its primary purpose is gone.
The result was The Brook Project – an event and installation at the site itself. One hundred embroidered flags marking moments from Carisbrook’s history and the surrounding neighbourhood’s. Bands played. A poetry group performed. Gardens on wheels were pushed around the perimeter of the site, a gentle absurdist gesture that somehow made perfect sense in context. The whole thing was published as a book in collaboration with Blue Oyster, featuring new writing and an interview with a local resident.
It’s a signature Novak move: take a place that people have stopped looking at, and insist – quietly, without drama – that it still has something to say. She doesn’t argue for preservation or against development. She just turns up, pays attention, and makes the attention visible.
Writing Place Names in Chalk
In 2021, for the Dunedin Fringe Festival, Novak organised a bike ride. Ten people pedalled around the Otago Peninsula with her while she stopped at chosen sites and wrote Maori place names in chalk on footpaths and concrete borders. The project was called An Unfinished Map of Maori Place Names in Otepoti, and it did exactly what the title says – no more, no less.
The names she wrote existed before the English ones did. They describe the land in terms of what was there, what happened there, what the place felt like to the people who named it. Writing them in chalk was a deliberately temporary act. The rain takes chalk. But the act of writing – and the act of ten people stopping to read, to listen, to notice – that leaves a different kind of mark.
It’s a work that could only come from someone who has done the research and then chosen the lightest possible way to share it. No plaque, no monument, no permanent installation. Just a name, in the right place, for as long as the weather allows.
Kawakawa and Mauri
The most recent direction in Novak’s practice takes her toward something that feels closer to care than to art – though she’d probably resist that distinction. MAURI-FY, shown at The Physics Room in Christchurch in mid-2024 as part of the group exhibition Like a broth, like a cure, was a space you could sit in. Drink tea. Rest.
The installation occupied the front of the gallery. You entered through a textile densely embroidered with kawakawa, and inside found materials gathered from the artist’s own garden, from hikoi, from friends. The work drew on Novak’s earlier research into indigenous and endemic plants – eighty-eight species collected during colonisation, their uses for fragrance and medicine documented through conversation, hands-on trial, and matauranga tipuna.
It’s a long way from the pixelated lightboxes of her 2014 Dunedin Public Art Gallery installation Sweet Child O’ Mine, with its helicopters and power lines and questions about what gets left behind. Or maybe it’s not so far at all. Both ask the same thing: what have we lost, and what can we recover?
What Dunedin Gives Her
A City That Leaves Room
Dunedin is not a city that fills every gap. Buildings sit empty. Sites languish between one use and the next. The economy has never been flush enough to over-develop, and the result – unintentional, unglamorous, but real – is space. Physical space, cheap rent, room to try things that wouldn’t survive a quarter’s review in Auckland.
For someone like Novak, whose projects unfold over months or years and rarely produce a sellable object, this matters. You can’t spend two years researching a decommissioned stadium if your studio lease demands a commercial return every twelve weeks. You can’t gather materials from your garden and your whanaunga’s kitchen if your practice is locked into a gallery cycle that runs on commissions and openings.
Dunedin doesn’t make this easy, exactly – it’s not as though there’s arts funding lying around unclaimed. But the city’s gaps create a kind of permission. An ecology forms in the spaces the market forgot, and artists who need time more than they need money find they can have it here.
Geoff’s Studio and the Artist-Run Scene
In 2015, Novak started Geoff’s Studio – an artist-run project space that she describes as a testing ground. No fixed rules, no set timeframes for exhibitions, no overarching authority dictating what goes on the walls or floor or ceiling. It’s the kind of space that exists because someone decided it should, and that’s reason enough.
She’d already served as trustee and secretary of the Blue Oyster Arts Trust from 2009 to 2011, so the artist-run model was familiar territory. Blue Oyster has been running since 1999, and it’s one of the reasons Dunedin punches above its weight in contemporary art – it gives artists a serious venue that isn’t tied to commercial outcomes. Geoff’s Studio operates in a similar spirit, at a smaller scale and with even fewer constraints.
This is the part of Novak’s practice that doesn’t show up on a CV the way exhibitions do, but it shapes the scene. Making space for other artists to experiment – without gatekeeping, without curation committees, without the pressure to produce work that sells – is infrastructure. She builds it the same way she builds her art: according to what’s needed, from whatever’s at hand.
The Quiet Engine
Where the Music and the Art Meet
Dunedin’s creative community is small enough that the borders between scenes blur. The people who show up at a Blue Oyster opening on Friday are at a gig at The Crown Hotel on Saturday and a poetry reading at Dog with Two Tails the following Tuesday. Musicians make visual art. Visual artists play in bands. Writers curate exhibitions. It’s not cross-pollination so much as a shared root system.
Novak sits at one of those intersections. The Brook Project wasn’t just flags and gardens – bands played at Carisbrook that day, and poetry groups performed. Sound has been part of her installations. She’s judged the visual arts and performance categories at the Dunedin Fringe Festival. Her work is as likely to turn up in a community hall as in a gallery, and the audiences in those spaces overlap with the audiences at house gigs and all-ages shows in converted warehouses.
In a city with Dunedin’s music mythology – the Dunedin Sound, Flying Nun, the long lineage of guitar bands making something out of nothing – the visual artists and multidisciplinary makers sometimes get overlooked. They’re working in the same tradition, though: limited resources, no commercial pressure to conform, and a stubborn commitment to the work itself.
Why This Work Matters Here
What Novak does – community-engaged, research-driven, grounded in te ao Maori and the specific histories of specific places – isn’t the kind of practice that generates headlines. There are no auction records. No celebrity collectors. The chalk washes off the footpath. The embroidered flags get folded and stored.
But this is exactly the kind of creative work that gives a city its texture. The people who write Maori place names where you walk, who turn abandoned stadiums into sites of remembrance and music, who open their studios as spaces where other artists can fail productively – they’re doing something that matters even when it’s hard to quantify.
Dunedin has always been good at producing this kind of artist. The ones who stay, who dig in, who make work that’s inseparable from the place it comes from. Novak is part of that lineage, and paying attention to what she does is one of the reasons we started writing things down in the first place.
There’s a particular kind of creative practice that doesn’t announce itself. It shows up in chalk on concrete, in embroidered flags at an empty stadium, in a space where you can sit and drink tea surrounded by kawakawa. Novak has been doing this work in Dunedin for close to two decades now, and the city is richer for it in ways that don’t fit neatly into a portfolio or a press release.