Michaela Gallear with her family, husband Simon and children Megan and Jack. Her parents in Turkey watched live as she graduated last week through Massey’s Graduation Live initiative.

From their home in Turkey, two proud parents watched live as their daughter crossed the stage at a Palmerston North graduation ceremony.

Michaela Gallear, of Tauranga, graduated last Wednesday with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in social anthropology.

Through Massey University’s Graduation Live initiative, all graduation ceremonies were streamed live on its YouTube channel, and Mrs Gallear’s parents in Turkey witnessed her milestone moment.

Her husband Simon and children, Megan, 13, and Jack, 16, were in the audience but she said her parents had also supported her as a mature student through five years of extramural study. Having them watch her graduate, from half a world away, made her feel connected and that they too were part of the celebrations.

Her parents Sandra and Robert Stables said they were thankful to be able to join in the happy day.

“Being quite literally a world away from family is hard enough every day but to know we miss such important events only make’s the separation even harder,” Mrs Stables wrote to Massey University.

“To two parents, living in Turkey, sitting in their PJs watching a very proud moment in their daughter’s life, it means the world.”

So far, the graduation videos from last week’s Palmerston North ceremonies have had more than 7000 views in more than 100 countries.

Some of the postcards produced by Open Lab during Semi-Permanent.

Massey Pasifika Scholars, their sponsors and advisors. Back row: Paul Fitzmaurice (Careers Development Advisor), Rachael Leafe (Pasifika Learning Advisor), Kieran Stowers, Samantha Dennis, Deanna Riach (Campus Registrar), Tevita Ahoafi, Jessanah Betham, Colin Lewis (Nova Energy). Front row: Richard Wilson (National Bank), Parke Englebretsen, Sashi Meanger (Pacific Islands Education Foundation), Sereana Bebenisala, Kieran Williams (National Bank).

Six top Pasifika students were awarded scholarships at Massey University in Wellington last week.

Kieran Stowers and Samantha Dennis received Massey University E tu Pasifika scholarships, which go to students who are nearing completion of their degrees who have demonstrated a high level of commitment and success in their studies. Mr Stowers, who is Samoan from Palmerston North, is studying for a Bachelor of Design (Honours). Ms Dennis, who is Samoan/Maori from Wellington, is studying for a Bachelor of Nursing. Both are final year students.

E tu is a Cook Island term and is about rising up and standing tall. Massey University Pasifika Learning Advisor Rachel Leafe says the term “captures the progression of Pasifika students throughout their academic journey. It is an appropriate name, reflecting the pride we take into the achievement of our Pasifika students.”

Four students received Pacific Islands Polynesian Scholarships, which are awarded to Pasifika students based on academic merit and need. The scholarships are offered by Massey University in conjunction with the Ministry of Education, The Pacific Islands Education Foundation and corporate sponsors.

Bachelor of Design (Honours) students Sereana Bebenisala and Parke Englebretsen received National Bank Pacific Islands Polynesian Scholarships. Ms Bebenisala is Fijian from South Auckland, and in her final year of study. Mr Englebretsen is Cook Islands from Lower Hutt, and in his first year.

Meanwhile, Tevita Ahoafi and Jessanah Betham received Nova Energy Pacific Islands Polynesian Scholarships. Mr Ahoafi is in his second year of a Bachelor of Business Studies. He is Tongan from Auckland. Ms Betham is in her second year of a Bachelor of Communication. She is Samoan from Porirua.

More than 1300 students will graduate at five ceremonies, followed by parades to The Square.

Collette Dinnigan

Massey University congratulates fashion designer Collette Dinnigan on becoming an Australian Fashion Laureate. The Laureate is in its fifth year and past winners include such eminent designers as Carla Zampatti, Akira Isogawa, Easton Pearson and Simon Lock.

Ms Dinnigan was last year inducted into Massey’s College of Creative Arts Hall of Fame. She was born in South Africa but raised in New Zealand and studied fashion design at Wellington Polytechnic (now part of Massey University), completing a certificate in clothing and textiles in 1984.

After graduating, Ms Dinnigan moved to Australia and in 1990 established her label, Collette Dinnigan, initially based around lingerie. Her fashion empire is now vast. Her collections, including lingerie and bridal, are stocked in 145 stores in Britain, Europe, Russia, the United States, Japan and the Middle East. Her delicate dresses are frequently worn by celebrities at red carpet events.

The Australian Fashion Laureate award was announced last night as part of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia in Sydney.

Fashion Programme Coordinator for the School of Design Mary-Ellen Imlach says Ms Dinnigan’s career is an inspiration to many aspiring young designers. “It takes huge creative talent, shrewd business sense, guts and stamina to build and maintain an international fashion brand.

We’re tremendously proud of what Collette has achieved.”

College of Creative Arts Hall of Fame Inductees:

2007
Len Lye – sculptor
Rebecca Taylor – fashion designer
Sir Richard Taylor – special effects supervisor

2008
Mark Pennington – industrial designer
Kate Sylvester – fashion designer
Gordon Walters – artist and graphic designer

2009
Grant Alexander – graphic designer
John Drawbridge – painter and printmaker
Jane Ussher – photographer

2010
Manos Nathan – ceramicist
Avis Higgs – textile designer
Fane Flaws – artist and designer

2011
John Churchward – typographic designer
Mark Elmore – industrial designer
Collette Dinnigan – fashion designer
Arthur Riley – school of design founder

A new style of television programme dedicated entirely to international news events launches this Sunday on TV3, in association with Massey University.

Called Three60, and fronted by TV3 news anchor Mike McRoberts, the half hour weekly programme will review the week’s key international news stories and feature a range of New Zealand based panellists, including a number of expert commentators from Massey University.

The programme will delve into the background of the major international stories and examine what that might mean for New Zealanders.

Assistant Vice-Chancellor (External Relations) Cas Carter says Massey’s new partnership with Three60 presents an excellent opportunity for the University to contribute strongly to these conversations.

“Massey’s focus is very much about the strength of our thought leadership and taking New Zealand’s ideas to the world.  We have a lot of people with huge knowledge and skills worth sharing, and this is an ideal platform”.   

TV3’s Director of News and Current Affairs, Mark Jennings, says the show will appeal to those who follow international events and appreciate the opportunity to have specialist commentators provide insights from a New Zealand perspective.

"It will be the place to go if you are interested in a deeper look at international news. We think there is a demand for a high-quality current affairs programme that looks at the big stories happening in the world."

Three60 screens every Sunday at 9am on TV3, from this Sunday.

Student artwork on display in the School of Fine Arts gallery, The Engine Room.

Viewing of massive video projections by Fine Arts students.

?Massey University is honoured to be gifted a new award for emerging artists.

The New Zealand Affordable Arts Trust has created four new awards for emerging artists, one of which will go to a student at Massey’s School of Fine Arts.

The awards, each worth $3000, are a generous gift from avid art collector Richard Nelson, patron of the New Zealand Art Show and trustee of the Trust.

Head of School Associate Professor Heather Galbraith says she is thrilled by the generosity of the trust and particularly of Mr Nelson.

“Our faculty will nominate senior students who are not only making excellent work, but who have demonstrated a commitment to showing their work within the public realm through compelling and innovative sites and fora,” Ms Galbraith says. A committee will meet in June to select the award recipient.

More information:
www.artshow.co.nz

Professor Ingrid Day, Assistant Vice-Chancellor (Academic & International), Dr Zoe Jordens,
Dr Elizabeth Gray, Associate Professor Andy Martin, Liz Norman, Vice-Chancellor Steve Maharey
and Professor Mark Brown, Director, National Centre for Teaching and Learning at the
teaching excellence award ceremony

Massey names its top teachers

Dr Rodger Fox

Journey Home, the CD recorded by Rodger Fox's Wellington Jazz Orchestra, has won the Tui for Best Jazz Album of the Year for 2012 in the Vodafone New Zealand Music Awards.

As one of New Zealand's foremost jazz trombonists and big band leaders, Dr Fox is no stranger when it comes to winning Tuis – he was a winner in 1981,2000, 2004 and – with the NZSM Big Band – in 2010.

Other finalist albums were Seven from Wellingtonian saxophonist Tim Hopkins and Delayed Reaction from Aucklander Phil Broadhurst.

The 2012 Tui was always going to be a cause for celebration at the Te Koki, New Zealand School of Music. Tim Hopkins recorded his album as part of his postgraduate study at NZSM and both Mr Broadhurst and Dr Fox are NZSM lecturers – at the Albany and Mt Cook campuses respectively.

In addition, the members of Dr Fox's Wellington Jazz Orchestra are largely current and former NZSM staff and alumni including Colin Hemmingsen (tenor sax), Dave Lisik (trumpet), Alex Nyman (alto sax), Nick Granville (guitar), Lance Philip (drums), Nick Tipping (bass) and Anita Schwabe (piano).

The Jazz Tui is announced and presented annually at the National Jazz Festival, hosted in the city of Tauranga during Easter weekend, and followed showcase performances by all three finalists. The National Jazz Festival in Tauranga was in its 50th year in 2012 and attracted more than 60,000 jazz enthusiasts over the four days of Easter.

The album Journey Home is the first CD from the Kiwi jazz legend's new band and was released in June 2011 by Jayrem Records. The album compositions are by acclaimed jazz pianist, arranger and composer Alan Broadbent and were produced by Rodger Fox and the band. The judging panel felt such a wealth of experience resulted in a thoroughly mature and accomplished first release.

New Zealand Music Awards spokesperson and RIANZ managing director Chris Caddick says, "It's fitting that a real icon of New Zealand music has won the Tui for Best Jazz Album in the 50th year of the National Jazz Festival in Tauranga. Sincere congratulations to Rodger Fox for a much deserved win."

The Wellington Jazz Orchestra has performed and honed its craft with some of the biggest names in jazz including Michael Brecker, Bill Cunliffe, Joe Williams, Louie Bellson, Bob Sheppard, Bruce Forman, Bill Reichenbach and Jim Pugh. Each side of the National Jazz Festival this Easter they performed with Grammy award-winning USA Jazz vocalists Kurt Elling and Patti Austin and saxophonist Eric Marienthal in concerts held in Wellington, Auckland and Tauranga. Proceeds from these concerts are going towards their next project: to travel to the USA in July to record an album at the legendary Capitol Studios in Los Angeles.

Katie Bevin’s Urban Tales (conceptual visualisation based on full scale mock-up)

Young New Zealanders in Milan Design Show

Katie Bevin

Cabinet from Chris Dwan’s Craft Native furniture collection

Lamp from Chris Dwan’s Craft Native furniture collection

Chris Dwan

Two recent Massey graduates are amongst a select group of designers worldwide to show work at the Milan Design Show.

Work by environmental graphic designer, Katie Bevin, and industrial/furniture designer, Chris Dwan, will be on display at the AddictLab collaborative space in the Milan show, alongside pieces by eleven other designers from Europe and South Africa. Milan Design Week is a huge and highly prestigious event, including the 51st edition of what has been described as “the planet’s greatest home furnishing exhibition”, the Salone Internazionale del Mobile. The Milan show runs from April 17 to April 22 this year.

Katie Bevin’s work, Urban Tales, has already won her three big design awards: a Society of Environmental Graphic Design honours award, an International Society of Typographic Designers merit award, and a Best Design silver award from The Designers Institute of New Zealand.

Urban Tales was Ms Bevin’s major project for her final year at Massey University’s School of Design. It comprises a modular typeface where the letter shapes she designed would be painted or inscribed on a surface and then modified by shadows cast on them by bollards placed at regular intervals. Words become visible when shadows meet the shapes on the ground, constructing a phrase across the course of a day. To be fully realised, the work needs to be installed in an outdoor space – much like a public sculpture.

Ms Bevin is hoping someone who sees her work in Milan will fund its full construction. “Milan is an amazing opportunity for my work to have exposure on an international level. I've tried a few avenues for my piece to be produced but unfortunately nothing has eventuated. I would love to see it made and this is giving me that opportunity,” Ms Bevin says.

In the meantime, this young woman from Napier is working at Sydney design studio Frost Design as an environmental graphic designer (a multidisciplinary combination of interior design, graphic design, architecture, industrial design and landscape design), and loving it.

Chris Dwan got a job at Weta Workshop in Wellington within a month of finishing his industrial design degree at Massey, but it is his furniture design that will feature in Milan. “The Milan show is a huge deal. It’s nice to be recognised for all the hard work, and it’s inspiring to know that there is a market for my designs,” Mr Dwan says.

Mr Dwan’s furniture collection, Craft Native, won silver at the Best Design awards last year. It requires the owner to personalise and embellish elements using a variety of simple crafting techniques. He says his research at Massey showed that the greater the role played by an individual in an object’s creation, the greater the bond between the person and the object. “I wanted to design pieces that had longevity, that could evolve with the owner over their lifetime, and that reduced the wastefulness of consumerism.”

Mr Dwan’s lamp design, for instance, requires owners to source thread, fibre, yarn, rope or wool material to create the shade portion of the lamp. This can be done over and over again to match home decor, or shifts in taste or style. Similarly, his cabinet can be customised by each owner downloading patterns from the Craft Native website and following simple instructions to create a range of ?outfits’ to dress or decorate the cabinet.

The collection is made from a limited range of materials, which can be easily disassembled for re-finishing or recycling, and uses standardised fixings and electrical components. The furniture is made of sustainably managed native tawa and ecoply plywood.

Dr Erin Helyard

The popular Friday evening free concert series from Te Kōkī, New Zealand School of Music, will begin again this week with a programme called  Bach & Father in the Ilott Theatre at Wellington Town Hall.

“This is the third year of the Friday evening concerts and once again we have scheduled a diverse range of music in the series from eclectic electroacoustic improvisation and jazz through to Beethoven with the New Zealand String Quartet and chamber music by Debussy, acknowledging the French composer’s 150th birthday," NZSM Director Professor Elizabeth Hudson says. "It is also terrific to be able to introduce our newest staff member to the Wellington public in the launch of the new season this Friday."

Dr Erin Helyard, newly appointed lecturer in historical performance practice at NZSM, will perform on one of the school’s harpsichords, choosing his repertoire from the vast number of keyboard compositions by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, and his father, Johann Sebastian.

“I called the programme ‘Bach & Father’,” Dr. Helyard notes, “as opposed to ‘Bach & Son’ because for most of the 18th century, CPE Bach was more highly regarded as a performer, composer, and theorist than his father. Johann Sebastian was considered a bit of a dinosaur – old-fashioned. Our opinions have now changed somewhat, with the perspective that time brings, but I believe the audience will be impressed with the imagination and kaleidoscopic verve that can be found in the son's oeuvre.”

This first ‘Friday at 5:15’ concert will start, obviously, at 5:15pm and will last for one hour. “We found last year, when we started the concerts right on 5pm, that there were a significant number of people who wished to come but couldn’t get to the venue in time, and so we have pushed the start time out just that little bit further,” Professor Hudson says. “The concerts are a way for the School to bring ‘downtown’ the quite remarkable talent that we have at NZSM among our staff and students.

“These concerts represent just a fraction of the musical activity going on at NZSM – in 2011, for example, we scheduled more than 280 events at our campuses at Mt Cook, Kelburn and Albany, the vast majority of which were free and open to the public. Through the ‘Friday at 5:15’ series in the Ilott Theatre, we aim to share some of this musical expertise with the wider public in a more convenient venue. For many people, it is a great opportunity to finish up a working week with some excellent, interesting, inspiring and beautiful music as well.”

There will be five concerts in the 2012 ‘Friday at 5.15’ series: April 3, June 29, August 24, September 14 and October 26. Each concert will be held in the Ilott Theatre, Wellington Town Hall, will be free and will last for one hour. More information: www.nzsm.ac.nz.

Te Kōkī, New Zealand School of Music, is a joint venture of Massey University and Victoria University of Wellington.

Work by Shannon Power (Chilton St James, 2011)

Hana Paine and Tahiwi Trenor Hunt both achieved Excellence in
NCEA Level 3 Visual Arts. They are now studying at the
University’s School of Design and School of Fine Arts.

Work by Hana Paine (Epsom Girls’ Grammar, 2011)

Work by Tahiwi Trenor Hunt (Horowhenua College, 2011)

Shannon Novak’s work, Outer Tone Connection IV, at the Albany campus library. It is from a series of works on display around Auckland as part of his Tone Connections installation.

See photo caption details below

Three recent Massey graduates are finalists in the iD International Emerging Designer Awards, to be announced this Thursday as part of iD Dunedin Fashion Week.

They are Samantha Murray, Andie Ye Ji and Luka Mues, all of whom completed honours degrees in fashion design at Massey University in 2011.


Samantha(Sam) Murray submitted an avant-garde collection called Sweet Suspension, which she describes as “an exercise in rethinking garment construction, making clothing from liquid”. Ms Murray worked in the Massey materials lab to devise a zero-waste material called Fiberform, which involves pouring a solution into a plastic mould, creating a lightweight structure formed without a single thread or stitch. Her collection comprises lusciously coloured, fruit-scented garment that she says “mesh classical sculpture and gummy lollies”.

Ms Murray, who is originally from Bay of Plenty, says Massey was an obvious choice for her studies “due to its great national and international reputation inspired both by successful family friends and Massey’s famous fashion graduates like Kate Sylvester.” She did take a year out during her studies, however, to work as an intern for leading London fashion designer, Christopher Kane. Massey senior lecturer in fashion design Jen Whitty says “we’re all dying to see what Sam does next”.

Andie Ye Ji’s collection, Muted Cries, reinterprets the lives of ancient Japanese courtesans. “It was a sensitive subject for a fashion collection, and Andie maintained a respectful, objective approach throughout,” Ms Whitty says. She describes Ms Ye Ji’s illustration as “extraordinary” and her textile technique, including needlepunch felting, as “beautiful”.

Ms Ye Ji was born in Beijing and moved to Hamilton with her family at the age of 16. She says she chose to study at Massey “because it was the only university in New Zealand to offer fashion design as a four-year academic degree; also because Wellington is one of my favourite cities in New Zealand.”

Luka Mues says his collection, Handed Down, was inspired by memories of a set of fine china. “It lies buried and unused, wrapped in yellowing newspaper and boxed away. Printed on the back is 'Made in England', but I know that it came from my dead German Oma." In 2010, Luka won the Shell Student Design Award at the World of Wearable Art Award. “Luka was yet another quite exceptional student,” Ms Whitty says.

“Overall, having three top students in the finals of the iD International Emerging Designer Awards is good recognition for Massey’s fashion degree programme. It validates what we’re doing,” she says.

Last year, Massey graduate Marie Kelly won the Mittelmoda Prize at these awards for her collection Look Into My Eyes, entitling her to compete alongside finalists from the top fashion schools worldwide in an Italian competition attended by large European fashion houses. Ms Whitty, who has herself been a finalist at Mittelmoda, says such awards “put your work on a world platform. They really do open doors, give you confidence and make the fashion world less daunting.”

Photos:
1.    Sweet Suspension, collection by Samantha Murray
2.    Muted Cries, collection by Andie Ye Ji
3.    Handed Down, collection by Luka Mues