Dina Arakelian

My name is Dinara, but everyone calls me Dina. I was born in Novkuznetsk, Russia. Before coming to New Zealand in 1996, I lived in Novosibirsk. I have been to St Petersburg, the same year I left for NZ and I love that city. I live in Auckland with my mum, brother, sister, a doggy - Juliette, a cockateil - Jojo - and a mouse - Mikey. I'm the eldest in my family, 23. My brother is 16 and my sister is 10. I'm very close with my family, especially my mum. She's my best friend. Last year my granddad passed away, he also lived with us and that was very hard on me and my family, so now our family is smaller without him. I am majoring in Media Design this year at Unitec. I love design, fashion, especially accessories!!! I'm quite a social person, though being in the last year of my course does make it a bit hard to go out, most of my weekends are spent on the computer designing work, but I love it! I finished grade 8 violin a few years ago, have done drama and have really enjoyed it! - did some hip hop dancing!

I only travelled once since I've lived in New Zealand and that was to Cape Town in South Africa. It was an AMAZING trip. It was an unforgettable experience, a beautiful country. I think that's it for now. Thank-you.

Dina Arakelian/Khametvaleeva.

Kristina Heep

The name on my passport is Kristina Heep. I hope to use this passport again soon.

I'm interested in communication, technology, the environment and the role images play in creating our sense of what all these things mean. Sometimes, for a multitude of reasons, I feel both attracted to and repulsed by glossy magazines and shopping malls. This makes me think about things like desire, dissatisfaction and tension in relation to our contemporary consumer culture. I mostly aim to represent in a responsible fashion in my life and my art.

Hazel Smith

Hi I'm Hazel. I'm a person who loves to make things and ideas. At Unitec I am currently in a third year studying Media Design, although you won't find me there at the moment. I am in melbourne on an exchange semester at RMIT University. It is a great experience but they are trying to put me in a 'graphic design box' and i don't fit. I live to create and execute crazy ideas, the outcomes of which vary from motion graphics to typography, from sound to print and from illustration to performance.

Hannah-May Thompson

Born in 1981, I spent most of my childhood growing up on farms around the North Island of new Zealand. When I was eight years old, our family settled in the Helensville area just North of Auckland. growing up in small, isolated places has been a huge factor in my current world-view.

I currently live in Point Chevalier, near central Auckland and I am between jobs. I spend my time working on my first chapbook Menagerie, cooking for my lover, knitting for various projects and craft-fairs, organizing collaborative ventures and stealing plants from neighboring properties.

Anneliese Kuegler

I wear clothes which is lucky because I dislike the appearance of my body. My clothes insinuate this, they also allude to the idea that I am an artist and just a wee bit cool. Both of these are questionable but fair conclusions one may glean from looking at me. My art embraces social concern from a personal to global level...'oh my breaking heart, the brutality of guns, ducks and mating for life'. nature is too precious to be 'prescious'. Jesus wants you to consume less and so do I.

Rachel Bell

I was raised in rural eastern Bay of Plenty and now I reside in central Auckland where I moved initially for study, graduating from Unitec in 2006 with a Bachelor of Design (hons) majoring in 3D, Contemporary Jewellery.

The use of textiles in my practice stems from an upbringing in which handcrafts were vital combined with ongoing research and contemplation on their wider social and cultural implications.

I am interested in the way in which familiar materials can be appreciated for their beauty and comport while also having the ability to occupy a slightly uncomfortable space.

Introductions

Marcus Williams - Curator for 'The Idiot'

I was born in Auckland and live there now with my partner of 20 years and our two children.

I have a cross-disciplinary art practice working in a wide range of media with a strong emphasis in lense based media. I have an enduring interest in collaboration and have collaborated with my wife over many years as well as other artists in all sorts of different ways. Our children are now integrated into the collaborative process and we have made photographs, videos, animations, drawings and performances.

My conceptual interests are tied up with this notion of ‘creative’ collaboration in as much as it is concerned with the hopelessly entangled nature of what Julia Kristeva calls the ‘social contract’ and the immediacy of lived experience; for example, love. Put another way, I am interested in the uncertain dimension of human behaviour which lies somewhere between social and mediated experience; the process by which all that is biological or ‘natural’ (that wonderfully problematic word), is ‘processed and codified into a highly complex system of signs. This is one of the reasons that I am so interested in FFC and it is the aspect of curatorial practice which attracts me; the possibility of facilitating collaborative projects.