Hi, I’m Nicole!

About Sookie Studio

Sookie Studio is the creative practice of a Tauranga-based artist working across contemporary printmaking, drawing, painting, and collage. The studio is named after Sookie, my cat and longtime creative companion, whose presence has quietly kept me company through many hours of making.

My work is inspired by the experience of connecting to multiple cultures — through bloodlines, place, and relationships. As a half Samoan, half Pākehā artist raised in Aotearoa New Zealand, I have long explored what it means to move between identities, histories, and ways of belonging.

Many of the motifs and symbols within my work began emerging in my late teens and continue to evolve today. Through repeated forms, landscape references, carved marks, and layered compositions, I create a personal visual language grounded in connection, ancestry, whenua, and growth.

While painting and sketching were my earliest mediums, printmaking has remained something I return to over time. I’m drawn to print for its balance of exploration and permanence — the ability to experiment through process while leaving an enduring mark.

Using Tetrapak etching, lino and wood carving, hand-burnished prints, collage, gouache, pencil, collage and press techniques, I create works that honour both process and meaning. Some pieces are made using a traditional printing press, others with a pasta machine or the back of a spoon — reflecting the resourcefulness and adaptability that also lives within the work itself.

After more than twenty years working across the visual and performing arts, returning to my own art practice has become an act of reclamation — of autonomy, skill, voice, and creative power.

Current series explore the relationship between Ranginui and Papatūānuku, the space between identities, and what can be cultivated when people meet with respect, love, and reciprocity.

My hope is that each work celebrates cultural diversity, cultural respect, and the importance of tangata, whenua, and what we are able to create together.