Suture Collective: Liminal

About the Exhibition

Suture Collective is a group of artists united in their exploration of mark making and painting as well as exploring individual and collective experiences within the natural world. Holly Clarke, Vanessa Narbey and Bridget Pahl bring a female perspective, reflecting on how visual space, nature and the particular tactility of paint come together to convey meaning.

Clarke’s dreamlike mindscapes, Narbey’s layered compositions that play with perception and Pahl’s more traditional still lifes and landscapes all highlight interconnectedness of nature and self, be it through observance, intuition and other sensory elements.

This work  shares a commitment to investigating the relationship between humanity and the environment we inhabit. Together they offer a profound reflection on how we navigate the complexities of memory, experience and perception, inviting viewers into a space where the personal and collective intertwine. 

About Suture Collective

Holly Clarke

Holly Clarke is an abstract expressionist eco-painter based in Aotearoa. Her practice explores the energy, emotion, and sensation of the human experience through the lens of nature. Using sustainably sourced, non-toxic, archival-quality earth pigments, she creates dreamlike, textured mindscapes that celebrate intuition, process, and the interconnectedness of inner and outer landscapes. 
 
Part of her childhood was spent on a rural farm near Matakana, where days immersed in the outdoors fostered a tactile, intuitive relationship with the land. This early connection to nature remains a quiet force in her work, revealing itself through organic forms, earthen hues, and an emotional sensitivity to texture and rhythm. 
 
Holly is fascinated by psychology and the inner dynamics of the mind. As an observer of emotional landscapes, she weaves sensory layers into her compositions—like a tapestry mapping the subtle interplay between feeling and perception. Her work blurs the boundaries between the senses, revealing a relationship and exchange between our internal states and the world around us. This space becomes a soft place to fall and rise again—a quiet terrain where strength and resilience are cultivated through presence and surrender. 
 
With over 30 years in design, including eight formative years in Florence, Italy, her previous work as a textile and graphic designer—including collaborations with brands like Citta Design—continues to inform her sensitivity to materiality, form, and movement. 
 
She was a 2024 finalist in both the Kumeu Art Awards and the Emerging Artist Award at The Upstairs Gallery. 
 
At its heart, her work offers a space for reflection, reconnection, and presence—an experience that is deeply personal but universally felt. 

hollyclarkestudios.com | @hollyclarkestudios

Vanessa Narbey

Vanessa Narbey lives in Auckland, Tamaki Makaurau. She holds a MFA with first class honors from Elam School of Fine Arts. A finalist in major art awards, she has exhibited her work globally and has art pieces held in both private and public collections worldwide. 

A key element of Narbey’s art practice is the process of layering. She works intuitively with stencils to create shapes, chaotic lines, markings, and areas of intense colour, building textured surfaces by masking and covering areas of pigment. This layering technique plays with our perception, vision, and focus, encouraging viewers to delve into a deeper introspection and create the idea of grasping and holding on to fragments of dreams, memories and stories.  

The ambiguity within her work fosters a sense of ongoing interpretation, as the viewer’s gaze oscillates between the familiar and the unknown. Narbey’s interest in pareidolia—the tendency of the human mind to find patterns and faces in seemingly random images—forms a significant part of her approach, evoking a psychological exploration of recognition, memory, and form. 

The textures and layers function as symbols of both the mundane and the significant, suggesting the interconnectedness of all things and the marks we leave behind as we navigate through time. Narbey’s fascination with maps and landforms—winding roads, riverbeds, and topographical lines—mirrors this interconnectedness. These maps, which she first encountered as a child tracing the pages of the family atlas, become a metaphor for journeys, histories, and the continuous flow of change, much like the shifting landscapes of human identity.  

The connections between technology and nature play a central role in her practice, particularly her fascination with sci-fi, space exploration, and planetary landscapes, and raise questions about human identity, perception, and our search for meaning in the vast, unknowable universe. In this, Narbey’s work challenges us to reflect on the ways we construct meaning amidst flux and change. 

At the heart of Narbey’s paintings lies an ongoing meditation on the fragility of our lives, memory and the passage of time. Her works evoke a contemplative, otherworldly quality that blurs the boundaries between abstraction and representational. Her work represents the landscape of the mind, offering viewers an introspective journey through their thoughts and emotions.

vanessanarbey.com | @vnarbeyart | vnarbey@gmail.com

Bridget Pahl

Bridget Pahl, a painter recently relocated  from Tāmaki Makaurau to Timaru, holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Canterbury and a postgraduate diploma in secondary art teaching from the University of Auckland. She has exhibited in group and solo shows across NZ and the UK. 

Pahl’s artistic practice is fundamentally concerned with the environments we inhabit, the figures that occupy these spaces, and the stories told within.   

In this body of work she presents a collection of landscapes and still lifes that examine a selection of introduced plant and tree specimens to Aotearoa. Her interest is drawn to the attachments formed to such botanica across time and the reasoning  behind their introduction. Connections of nostalgia and memory sit alongside the discomforting awareness of damage sustained to endemic plant and bird life through past colonial intentions.  

From a visual perspective Pahl works from life and photography to examine the shifting interplay of light and form, using oil paint and pastels. Adding and removal of paint using a variety of tools builds on a range of marks within her pieces, advancing and receding within a figurative plane. 

@bridgetpahlpainting | bridgetpahl@gmail.com