Caselberg Trust Creative Connections resident 2027 Sarah Smuts-Kennedy
Credit: Artist in studio, 2026.
The Caselberg Trust announced today that its Creative Connections Resident 2027 will be Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland-based artist Sarah Smuts-Kennedy.
Sarah works across painting, sound, installation and participatory practice, and will be working on the next phase of Awake in Tree Time, a long-duration project emerging from a decade of listening to trees that began during her 2016 McCahon House Residency and is now converging with the total solar eclipse that will cross Australia and Ōtepoti Dunedin on 22 July 2028.
Sarah holds an MFA (First Class Honours) from Elam School of Fine Arts and was the 2016 McCahon House Resident. Her work has been presented at institutions including Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Artspace Aotearoa, Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery and Wollongong Art Gallery, as well as in galleries and projects across Aotearoa and Australia. Sarah says, “I am deeply honoured to be given this opportunity at such a critical juncture in my career and in the development of this work. I look forward to making the most of this precious time at Caselberg House.”
The 3-month long Caselberg Trust Creative Connections residency started in 2012 and is specifically targeted for projects that reach out and make links across a variety of creative media, and professional disciplines, and/or to communities relevant to the planned project. Recent Creative Connections Residents have been Bridget Reweti (2019), Lucy Marinkovich (2021), Sarah Hudson (2022), Alison Isadora (2023), Katie Breckon (2024), Jess Nicolson (2025), Ngaroma Riley (2026).
The Caselberg Trust purchased the Broad Bay, Dunedin home of the late John and Anna Caselberg in 2006, with the aim of hosting creative residencies in the house. Since inception, the Trust has held a variety of creative projects and events, as well as hosting several well-known New Zealand writers and artists at the cottage.
Sarah Smuts-Kennedy is a Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland-based artist working across painting, sound, installation and participatory practice. Her work explores relationships between people, place and living systems through long-duration projects grounded in listening and ecological enquiry. Alongside her studio practice, Smuts-Kennedy founded For the Love of Bees, a long-duration social sculpture that has evolved into Earthworkers, a national education platform supporting regenerative horticulture and ecological learning.
During the Caselberg Creative Connections Residency, Sarah Smuts-Kennedy will develop the next phase of Awake in Tree Time, a long-duration project emerging from a decade of listening to trees that began during her 2016 McCahon House Residency and is now converging with the total solar eclipse that will cross Australia and Ōtepoti Dunedin on 22 July 2028.
At the centre of the residency will be the development of Awake, a major new multi-panel painting, alongside sound, archival research and dialogue with artists, writers, astronomers and local communities.
The project has a particular relationship with Ōtepoti. Before beginning her McCahon House Residency in 2016, Smuts-Kennedy travelled to Dunedin to experience The Wake (1958), created through the collaboration between John Caselberg and Colin McCahon. The painting is double-sided, with its reverse remaining largely unseen.
Almost a decade later she encountered On the Nature of Art (1953), Caselberg and McCahon’s unpublished collaborative manifesto. Together, these works have become important points of orientation within the project.
The Caselberg Residency will give Smuts-Kennedy time to make new work, spend time within the landscapes of Ōtepoti, undertake archival research, and develop relationships that will contribute to future artistic responses around the 2028 eclipse.
Rather than approaching the eclipse simply as spectacle, Awake in Tree Time considers what might be possible when communities separated by great distances experience the same extraordinary celestial event. The project uses this shared moment as a framework for bringing artists, writers, scientists and communities into a wider creative ecology —connecting past, present and future, and asking what forms of “future light” art might help us imagine together.,
Caselberg Trust contact - Trustee Robert West at info@caselbergtrust.org for further information, or www.caselbergtrust.org. Contact Sarah Smuts-Kennedy at - sarahsmutskennedy@gmail.com