vanessa
narbey.
tāmaki makaurau. | auckland.
Vanessa is a Visual Artist with a MFA from Elam School of Fine Arts. She explores visual perception in her art pieces with layering of colourful pigment and lines creating veils of textured marks. Her work has been exhibited globally with pieces held in both private and public collections worldwide.
With brushes and tools, Vanessa works intuitively to create shapes, lines and textures with intense colour, building up the surface 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 gestural marks create a meditative quality and the illusion of pulsating energy, movement and a sense of aliveness within the works.
At the heart of Vanessa's mixed media pieces lies an ongoing contemplation of the fragility of our lives, memory and the passage of time. Her works evoke a reflective, otherworldly quality that often blurs the boundaries between abstraction and representational.
Vanessa was awarded Second Place in the Kumeu Art Awards in 2025, and she has been a finalist in other major art awards both nationally and internationally. She also teaches meditative drawing workshops.
