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Published on 13 October 2026
The opening of Mahika Toi Mahika Kai, the Forrester Gallery extension, earlier this year has expanded the artistic horizons of the Waitaki District and ensured the safe storage and preservation of its extensive collection of over 2,500 local, regional and nationally important artworks.
The project, funded by a Ministry of Culture and Heritage’s Regional and Cultural Heritage Fund grant and other trust grants, bequests and many years of hard work by the Friends of the Forrester Gallery, may soon add another accolade.
The Project Team; Waitaki District Council, Verve Projects, Tilt Architecture and Naylor Love are the finalists in the South Island’s Veros ‘Best Team Award’ celebrates high-performing project teams demonstrating excellence in collaboration, innovation, and delivery – with the winner due to be announced this Thursday.
The partnership between Council and its project management, architecture and construction team delivered the long-desired Forrester Gallery extension on-time and on-budget earlier this year, and allowed the gallery to host Paemanu: Karakaraka Toi – a collective art project about the Waitaki River – for the first time in Aotearoa New Zealand.
More recently the gallery has hosted local artwork of local school and kindergarten students in the annual Burns Memorial exhibition and is currently running Mahi Toi: Part One, with a focus on themes of employment, extraction, industrialisation and manual labour and an exhibition from Kakanui artist Peter Cleverley.
ENDS
media@waitaki.govt.nz