“Early in 2024, while walking, I found a Pakohe Toki half-buried and only visible in the rocky coastal soil of the rural Southland farm where I live with my partner. I took the Toki to the local rūnaka for advice on what to do with such a precious artefact. This led to a serendipitous encounter with a kaumātua from Ōraka-Aparima, who blessed the toki with a karakia in the car park of our tiny local Supervalue. The discovery of this long buried taonga and its repatriation has led me to reflect deeply upon the history of this place that I call home and the events that have shaped and defined it.”

Daegan Wells’ presentation in The Changing Room explores aspects of domestic rural life from his Southland home. For this new body of work, his partner’s family farm at Colac Bay near Riverton becomes a case study for gaining insight into the people, industry and processes of the area. Since the 1800s, the farm and surrounding whenua have undergone many stages of evolution, including being the site of one of Aotearoa’s earliest gold excavations, home to a large Chinese settlement in the 1870s, and supporting various sawmilling operations. In conducting research for this project, Wells has connected with his partner’s extended family, interviewing and gathering archives from whānau who grew up on the farm, including residents of the farmhouse from the 1930s and his partner’s great-aunt.


Because of where I live brings the materiality of the artists’ Southland surroundings into the gallery. Wells’ utilisation of wool, timber and handwoven fabrics provides a reflection of rural life and the artist’s own interest in site and the politics of place. Drawing on fine craft skills learned locally from rural weavers, Wells has created a collection of household objects inspired by handmade furniture once found in the original 19th century farm cottage.

What Thrives on These Soils brings together artists whose work examines the agricultural legacies, politics, and economies of Aotearoa New Zealand. Framing the land as both resource and responsibility, the exhibition complicates dominant narratives of growth and prosperity. The works presented probe the realities of labour, cycles of economic rise and decline, and global systems of exchange that shape food and fibre production.


Daegan Wells’ works consider the fraught markets and histories of wool, a fibre once central to the nation’s economy. Component of Made for the Home (Large Rug) (2024), hand-loomed from pet fleece, invites tactile encounters and functions as seating within the exhibition space. It also grounds Wells’ moving-image work in the space. Bush Coat (2020) is a silent video weaving together archival carpet designs from Parliament’s 1996 refurbishment with views of rural Southland, where sheep stations have given way to dairy farming. By placing luxury interiors alongside altered farming landscapes, Wells draws out tensions between nostalgia for natural fibres and their shifting economic value.


Across the exhibition, such works illuminate the experiences of workers and communities shaped by proximity to farming industries, while interrogating settler-colonial perspectives that position the land as a site for individual profit. Rather than celebrating productivity alone, the artists foreground lived histories and collective resilience, gestures that might seed more sustainable and equitable futures.

Finest Fuchsias

William Hodges Fellowship Exhibition

Daegan Wells presents a group of three works, each in response to the natural and built environment around Ōtepuni Gardens. The work also pays homage to the florist, gardener and naturalist James Morton who was responsible for the original design of the Gardens in 1872.


Through a combination of archival research, observation, conversation, and “deep listening” to the social context of the local built and natural environment, Wells’ work comprises documentary fragments and reflections that pose questions about the delicate, transient, and elusive nature of histories of place and how these are remembered in the present.

In 2023, Daegan Wells received a Creative Communities Grant to present Local Makers to the Aparima Riverton community that first inspired the project. The exhibition, held for one week in the historic Union Church Hall, traced the life and legacy of Aparima’s clothing factory workers.

First presented at the 2022 Aotearoa Art Fair, the Aparima showing offered a chance to bring these stories home, celebrating the people whose work shaped the town’s history and identity.

Local Makers pays homage to histories of a small clothing factory in Aparima Riverton, in Te Wai Pounamu the South Island of Aotearoa, from the 1940s–80s. Memories uncovered - scraps brought home to make hats and clothes for loved ones, for example, inspired Daegan Wells’ resulting series of textile works. 


In order to mirror the locally sourced materials and the efforts of the handmade, Wells has used muka, natural dyed linens and wool cultivated from animal to yarn in his home in Murihiku Southland. These works remember, recognise and comment on the changing face of Aotearoa New Zealand’s primary industry and the communities which serviced it.

For A Gathering Distrust, Daegan Wells centres his research on the contested foreshore of Lake Manapouri, working with video installation and ceramic pieces formed from clay gathered along the lake's edge.


In October 1969, a group of local campaigners met in a house in Waihōpai Invercargill, setting in motion a plan to counter the proposed raising of Lake Manapouri as part of the Manapouri hydropower project. The campaign launched by Save Lake Manapouri Committees across Aotearoa demonstrated the power of protest in shaping government policy, and has since come to symbolise a turning point in Aotearoa's engagement with environmental issues. A Gathering Distrust revisits the tense relationship between Save Lake Manapouri supporters and the National Government under Jack Marshall in the lead-up to the 1972 election.

2015—Masters of Fine Arts with Distinction, University of Canterbury, Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa  
2012—Bachelor of Fine Arts Honours, University of Canterbury, Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa
2011—Bachelor of Fine Arts, Whitecliffe College of Art and Design, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa