ROWAN PANTHER

Announced in 2024 as a McCahon House Parehuia Artist in Residence, she undertook the residency from September to December 2025 in Titirangi, West Auckland, returning to the suburb where she first learnt lace-making as a teenager. Working between art, jewellery, and textile, Panther’s intricate neckpieces, chest adornments, and ritual vessels explore how wearing can be a form of ceremony, memory, and collective story-telling.

Early years and background

Panther grew up in Northland and Auckland, discovering lace-making while at high school in Titirangi. She later studied fashion and textile design in Tāmaki Makaurau, where she began combining European bobbin lace structures with muka, the prepared inner fibre of harakeke (New Zealand flax).

Now based between Tāmaki Makaurau and Te Tai Tokerau, Panther works from a studio practice grounded in Māori fibre knowledge and sustained relationships with weavers and growers. During her 2025 McCahon House Parehuia residency she researched the bush and coastal ecologies around French Bay, developing new works that responded to the McCahon family home and the layered histories of the site.

Rowan Panther Artworks

Rowan Panther’s artworks centre on muka lace jewellery and fibre-based sculptural adornments that are made to be worn, to hang, and to gather on the body like living architecture. Her works often involve slow, labour-intensive knotting and plaiting techniques that push muka to behave like thread, rope, and fabric all at once.

Muka lace and early works

Panther began developing muka lace after experimenting with bobbin lace patterns using harakeke fibre supplied by weaver friends and whānau. Early works established her signature combination of delicate lace structures with robust, almost armoured silhouettes that sit close to the chest and throat. Garland magazine has described her practice as ‘knotting culture’, noting how the repetitive movement of lace-making becomes a way of braiding together whakapapa (genealogy), land, and identity.

Jewellery, ritual vessels, and installations

Panther’s pieces range from intimate neck adornments to larger works that function as sculptural garments or suspended forms. Her work appears in Te Papa Tongarewa’s applied arts and design collections, including the lei work Lei #1 and pieces from the category Ritual Vessels, which imagine lei-like forms as containers for breath, voice, and presence. She has created installation-scaled arrangements of muka lace for exhibitions in Aotearoa and Australia, extending jewellery logics of fastening and clasping into room-scale environments.

In 2021 the exhibition Pieces of Place at Masterworks Gallery, Auckland, brought together works that meditated on belonging and displacement through intricately worked muka lace and collected natural materials. Panther has also contributed to projects such as the New Zealand Fashion Museum’s ‘Fashioning Assembly Aotearoa’ and Deep Material Energy II at the Australian Design Centre, which highlighted her interest in how contemporary jewellery can hold community, protest, and care.

Select Awards and Accolades

• McCahon House Parehuia Artist in Residence (2025), Titirangi, Auckland
• Participant, Schmuck international contemporary jewellery exhibition, Munich, 2024
• Inclusion in Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand, national collection

Rowan Panther Exhibitions

Rowan Panther has been the subject of solo exhibitions and included in significant group exhibitions in Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally. Below is a selection of important exhibitions.

Select solo exhibitions

• Pieces of Place, Masterworks Gallery, Auckland, 20 March–10 April 2021
• Small Space: Rowan Panther, Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery, Titirangi, 2016

Select group exhibitions

• Rangirua, Pātaka Art + Museum, Porirua, 2 November 2024–9 March 2025
• Deep Material Energy II, Australian Design Centre, Sydney, 2024
• More is More, Costume and Textile Association of New Zealand exhibition, Wellington, 2025

Rowan Panther Instagram

Rowan Panther’s Instagram can be found here.

Rowan Panther FAQs

Ocula | 2026