Nicola Price of Orchid Blue NZ leads a busy life: she is a jewellery maker by day and an HCA in a rest home/dementia unit by night. Her jewellery reflects her desire to reduce waste by upcycling and recycling tiny everyday art treasures – vintage silverwares and Aotearoa’s beautiful old coins.
Canterbury maker Craig Divers of Starting from Zero is a firm believer in working with the materials you’ve got. Strongly influenced by his farm upbringing and a decade living in Asia, he produces original and innovative art and homewares by recycling those great Kiwi icons, corrugated iron, fencing wire, and the good old swappa crate.
Ronja Schipper of re:purpose has been crafting lovingly up-cycled jewellery since 2015. By using under-valued resources such as discarded bicycle inner tubes to create her stunningly soft and silky feather earrings, she aims to highlight our relationship with our at-risk environment and its resources.
Nana Sakaguchi of Hena Hena has a passion for giving vintage kimonos new lives and letting them shine again. Compared to designing and making clothes from new fabrics, upcycling these beautiful items needs a lot of extra work. However Nana believes this is a worthwhile task: to pass on the beauty of Japanese kimonos to future generations as wearable and useful items.
Through her work as textile artist and eco dyer, Karen Williamson of Nuku finds a spiritual connection to the land and its changing seasons. Using only natural resources, foraged from the local Kaipara landscape, Karen infuses prints of leaves, petals, seeds and bark into natural fibres to create a unique range of scarves, clothing and gifts. The name Nuku comes from te reo Māori, meaning earth. Karen lives in rural Kaiwaka and is building a sustainable lifestyle on a half-acre section with her husband, Luke.
Canterbury maker Re:created makes timeless toys with heart, soul… and an eco-conscience! This adorable elephant is lovingly pieced together from 100% clean upcycled materials – in this case a hand dyed woollen blanket and cotton fabric.
A small but dedicated salvage team based in Christchurch, The Silvan started out life as an art gallery and café. When their building was lost in the 2011 earthquakes, the team came back fighting, shifting their focus to saving and repurposing beautiful timbers, hand salvaged from damaged buildings. Founders Debra and GT believe in minimising waste and reusing everything they can to make pieces that are practical, beautiful, and full of soul.
Studio Three Two Four is a Christchurch-based small business specialising in these stunning wooden mosaic wall art and home decor pieces – all painstakingly created from locally sourced, salvaged and repurposed materials.
These stylish drop earrings with variegated gold foil from Liberation are super light and comfortable, as well as being absolutely gorgeous. Made from recycled mahogany…
Joe Wright of Bearwood Workshop handcrafts his beautiful wooden homewares and sculpture – all made from sustainable and recycled New Zealand native timber – from a little tractor shed in Glendhu Bay overlooking Lake Wanaka. After years of working as a designer in many different disciplines, running his own consultancy and clocking up the air miles with large corporations as clients, he decided to shed it all and go back to his roots. His days are now spent following his passion: designing and making simple, beautiful, sustainable items that will stand the test of time.