COFFEE PEN x NOA RECORDS
PRESENT A SPECIAL MARKET EVENT:
LITTLE CROSSROADS
SATURDAY, 12TH APRIL 2025
9am - 2pm. Coffee Pen, Eden Terrace
Māori, Pasifika, and Japanese artists/makers and performances by Noa Records
Brett Graham, Thea Ceramics, Cora-Allan, Courtney Sina Meredith, Janet Lilo, Ao Cacao, Serene Hodgman, Lucky Dip, Misma Anaru, Whatu Creatrive, Sina Leo, Yuri Nagashima, Onta-yaki, Shoichi Kudo
Donating 5% of sales to those in need
Brett Graham
A Māori sculptor known for his powerful explorations of colonial history and cultural identity. His work Wastelands (2024), originally commissioned for the Venice Biennale, was recently acquired by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.
Thea Ceramics
Founded by ceramic artist Esther McDonald, Thea Ceramics specializes in wheel-thrown stoneware inspired by the coastal landscape. Each piece is crafted for contemporary, functional use on Waiheke Island.
Rāhana Tito-Taylor
Founder of Noa Records | Taonga Puoro Maker | Kaiwhakatangitangi | Puoro from Te Tai Tokerau, Aotearoa
Lucky Dip
Founded by Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland-based maker Tuhirangi Blair. An alumnus of Nepenthes New York and Workshop Denim, Blair explores the form and functionality of vintage garments through repurposed materials. Now based in London, he is also a proud member of 1% for the Planet and the NEXUS Global Community.
A Māori sculptor known for his powerful explorations of colonial history and cultural identity. His work Wastelands (2024), originally commissioned for the Venice Biennale, was recently acquired by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.
Thea Ceramics
Founded by ceramic artist Esther McDonald, Thea Ceramics specializes in wheel-thrown stoneware inspired by the coastal landscape. Each piece is crafted for contemporary, functional use on Waiheke Island.
Rāhana Tito-Taylor
Founder of Noa Records | Taonga Puoro Maker | Kaiwhakatangitangi | Puoro from Te Tai Tokerau, Aotearoa
Lucky Dip
Founded by Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland-based maker Tuhirangi Blair. An alumnus of Nepenthes New York and Workshop Denim, Blair explores the form and functionality of vintage garments through repurposed materials. Now based in London, he is also a proud member of 1% for the Planet and the NEXUS Global Community.
Janet Lilo
A multidisciplinary artist exploring digital culture, identity, and community through photography, video, and installation. A founding member of Whau the People, her work is held in major collections like Te Papa and Auckland Art Gallery.
Ao Cacao
Founded by Thomas Netana Wright , Ao Cacao is a boutique bean-to-bar chocolate maker dedicated to ethical sourcing and craftsmanship. Their chocolate highlights the unique flavors of premium cacao.
Misma Anaru
A Māori ceramic artist based in Karangahake Gorge, working with uku (clay) sourced in Aotearoa. She crafts minimalist, hand-built pieces that celebrate form, function and daily ritual.
Serene Hodgman
Samoan, Rotuman, Tongan, and Irish descent. Her work integrates traditional Pacific crafts like tivaevae, ‘ie toga, and kapa kuiki with contemporary materials, reflecting cultural heritage and identity.
Cora-Allan
A multidisciplinary artist renowned for her work with the traditional art of hiapo (Niue barkcloth) A McCahon House resident artist in 2021, her work bridges heritage and contemporary practice.
A multidisciplinary artist exploring digital culture, identity, and community through photography, video, and installation. A founding member of Whau the People, her work is held in major collections like Te Papa and Auckland Art Gallery.
Ao Cacao
Founded by Thomas Netana Wright , Ao Cacao is a boutique bean-to-bar chocolate maker dedicated to ethical sourcing and craftsmanship. Their chocolate highlights the unique flavors of premium cacao.
Misma Anaru
A Māori ceramic artist based in Karangahake Gorge, working with uku (clay) sourced in Aotearoa. She crafts minimalist, hand-built pieces that celebrate form, function and daily ritual.
Serene Hodgman
Samoan, Rotuman, Tongan, and Irish descent. Her work integrates traditional Pacific crafts like tivaevae, ‘ie toga, and kapa kuiki with contemporary materials, reflecting cultural heritage and identity.
Cora-Allan
A multidisciplinary artist renowned for her work with the traditional art of hiapo (Niue barkcloth) A McCahon House resident artist in 2021, her work bridges heritage and contemporary practice.
Sina Leo
From “the sticks” of Wai Pounamu, Sina explores introspections of the human experience through diverse creative forms. Sequence of Internal Processes 1-10 navigates a progression along an internal pathway of reflection, solitude, and connection. Blending moving images with digital abstractions, she offers way-finders and collected keys of thought: some gentle, some sharp. and our varied responses, blending moving images with abstraction and symbolism to express what words cannot.
Courtney Sina Meredith
A poet, playwright, and fiction writer of Samoan, Mangaian, and Irish descent. Her acclaimed works, including Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick (2012) and Tail of the Taniwha (2016), explore identity, gender, and social justice. She has held international residencies and received multiple awards, including the Adam NZ Play Award.
Fern Ngatai
Fern Ngatai, a descendant of Ngāti Porou and Tainui, is an Urban Māori moko artist from West Auckland, Ranui. She works exclusively with ink on skin and paper, creating bold and elegant designs that connect people to their tīpuna and identity.
From “the sticks” of Wai Pounamu, Sina explores introspections of the human experience through diverse creative forms. Sequence of Internal Processes 1-10 navigates a progression along an internal pathway of reflection, solitude, and connection. Blending moving images with digital abstractions, she offers way-finders and collected keys of thought: some gentle, some sharp. and our varied responses, blending moving images with abstraction and symbolism to express what words cannot.
Courtney Sina Meredith
A poet, playwright, and fiction writer of Samoan, Mangaian, and Irish descent. Her acclaimed works, including Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick (2012) and Tail of the Taniwha (2016), explore identity, gender, and social justice. She has held international residencies and received multiple awards, including the Adam NZ Play Award.
Fern Ngatai
Fern Ngatai, a descendant of Ngāti Porou and Tainui, is an Urban Māori moko artist from West Auckland, Ranui. She works exclusively with ink on skin and paper, creating bold and elegant designs that connect people to their tīpuna and identity.
Yurie Nagashima
Yurie Nagashima was born in Tokyo in 1973. Her self-portraits defied gender expectations in 1990s Japan, gaining the PARCO Prize in 1993 and the Kimura Ihei Award in 2001. Her photographic practice continues to be a powerful tool to explore identity, sexuality, family formation, and feminism. Today Japan still ranks low on gender equality, placing 125th (compared to 4th for Aotearoa New Zealand) out of 145 countries. When Yurie began her career men had power in most industries. This included photography, where women’s roles were often limited to assisting rather than being behind the lens. One way to subvert this power dynamic was for Yurie to place herself both behind and in front of the lens, serving as both subject and artist.
With a gaze all of her own, Yurie’s unflinching photographs give a sense that outside opinions are inessential to her world. The male gaze, however, has still had influence on her external reception. One critic dismissed her self-portraiture as ‘onnanoko shashin’ (‘girl photography’). This patronising term provided grist for the mill, and in 2020 Yurie published a critical response against it, From His “Onnanoko Shashin” to Her Girly Photo. From challenging the packaging of girlhood to building up genuine opportunities for community care as practice, Yurie has always believed in the power of creative release. As she shared with i-D Magazine, "releasing your ideas and expressing yourself is good for any human [and] I found that art can be that; I could forget about all my problems while I was making it.”
Yurie Nagashima was born in Tokyo in 1973. Her self-portraits defied gender expectations in 1990s Japan, gaining the PARCO Prize in 1993 and the Kimura Ihei Award in 2001. Her photographic practice continues to be a powerful tool to explore identity, sexuality, family formation, and feminism. Today Japan still ranks low on gender equality, placing 125th (compared to 4th for Aotearoa New Zealand) out of 145 countries. When Yurie began her career men had power in most industries. This included photography, where women’s roles were often limited to assisting rather than being behind the lens. One way to subvert this power dynamic was for Yurie to place herself both behind and in front of the lens, serving as both subject and artist.
With a gaze all of her own, Yurie’s unflinching photographs give a sense that outside opinions are inessential to her world. The male gaze, however, has still had influence on her external reception. One critic dismissed her self-portraiture as ‘onnanoko shashin’ (‘girl photography’). This patronising term provided grist for the mill, and in 2020 Yurie published a critical response against it, From His “Onnanoko Shashin” to Her Girly Photo. From challenging the packaging of girlhood to building up genuine opportunities for community care as practice, Yurie has always believed in the power of creative release. As she shared with i-D Magazine, "releasing your ideas and expressing yourself is good for any human [and] I found that art can be that; I could forget about all my problems while I was making it.”
Onta-yaki (小鹿田焼)
Onta is a small village in Oita, Kyushu. Founded in the Edo period (around 300 years ago), the village is now home to 14 families who live and work together as a careful ecosystem of craftspeople. Ten of the families are onta-yaki potters, one family serve as builders, another are traditional plasterers, and a final family runs the village sake bar and soba noodle shop.
Onta-yaki pottery is a hyper-local effort. The earth used for the pottery is found in the mountains around Onta. Not immediately pliable, the material starts out as rocks that need to be ground to a powder before use. As per tradition there is no electrical power used to make onta-yaki – only the river-fed water wheel that transfers natural energy to wooden hammers. The fine ground rocks are then placed in water, where the dirt can float to the surface and be skimmed away.
The techniques for preparing and shaping the pottery forms are passed down from parent to child, generation to generation. They haven’t changed in 300 years. In honour of this long stretch of collective knowledge and practice, the potters of Onta never put their own name or maker’s mark on their works, instead marking the pottery purely with the name of the village. Onta. This way they also credit the other-than-human contributors, too: the mountains and the river of Onta.
Shoichi Kudo
Our favourite photographer, journalist and curator Kyoichi Tuszuki who published Tokyo Style Tuszuki curated an exhibition for Shoichi Kudo in Tokyo 2 years ago,which Fumi was lucky to be able to visit.
Shoichi Kudo was born in 1929, just shy of the age of enlistment in WWII. In his lifetime, Kudo had a modest career as a local photo-journalist in the small fishing town of Aomori in the North of Japan. However, it was only some years after Shoichi Kudo’s death in 2014 that his daughter Kanako Kudo came upon a hidden collection of negatives – a collection that would come to define her father’s artistic legacy and connect with people all over the world. Scanning the carefully-preserved stash of negatives revealed thousands of photographs of post-war life in 1950’s Aomori, as seen from Shoichu Kudo’s point of view. Working class shame or imposter syndrome meant Kudo kept his work mostly to himself, not seeing how he could contribute to the art world and cultural centre of Tokyo. Today his images are a treasured documentation of the charms and trials of Aomori.
Kudo’s photographs honour the free-wheeling independence of the children in the town, the collectivity of people at work, and the ritual changing of the seasons. A mound of autumn apples; a path hewn through winter snow. Exuberant jumbles of togetherness are pitched alongside images of haunting isolation. In one photograph a poetry of birds scatter themselves across a clouded sky. While in his lifetime Kudo may have judged himself as too peripheral, the particularities of Aomori and all of its contradictions – material deprivation alongside community riches – have spread far and wide, thanks to his daughter Kanako’s advocacy and use of social media. This democratisation of art circulation has made our small exhibition on the other side of the Pacific possible.
Our favourite photographer, journalist and curator Kyoichi Tuszuki who published Tokyo Style Tuszuki curated an exhibition for Shoichi Kudo in Tokyo 2 years ago,which Fumi was lucky to be able to visit.
Shoichi Kudo was born in 1929, just shy of the age of enlistment in WWII. In his lifetime, Kudo had a modest career as a local photo-journalist in the small fishing town of Aomori in the North of Japan. However, it was only some years after Shoichi Kudo’s death in 2014 that his daughter Kanako Kudo came upon a hidden collection of negatives – a collection that would come to define her father’s artistic legacy and connect with people all over the world. Scanning the carefully-preserved stash of negatives revealed thousands of photographs of post-war life in 1950’s Aomori, as seen from Shoichu Kudo’s point of view. Working class shame or imposter syndrome meant Kudo kept his work mostly to himself, not seeing how he could contribute to the art world and cultural centre of Tokyo. Today his images are a treasured documentation of the charms and trials of Aomori.
Kudo’s photographs honour the free-wheeling independence of the children in the town, the collectivity of people at work, and the ritual changing of the seasons. A mound of autumn apples; a path hewn through winter snow. Exuberant jumbles of togetherness are pitched alongside images of haunting isolation. In one photograph a poetry of birds scatter themselves across a clouded sky. While in his lifetime Kudo may have judged himself as too peripheral, the particularities of Aomori and all of its contradictions – material deprivation alongside community riches – have spread far and wide, thanks to his daughter Kanako’s advocacy and use of social media. This democratisation of art circulation has made our small exhibition on the other side of the Pacific possible.
