Tools of the Trade

Above: Alysn in her Tawharanui studio using one of her many 'tools of the trade', her gas element to tarnish and manipulate the metallic fabric used in her creations.

There is something quietly fascinating about peering into an artist's studio. We expect to see paint brushes standing in jars, palettes layered with colour and shelves lined with canvases. But look beyond the obvious and you'll often discover the real story isn't about the artwork at all – it's about the unexpected tools that helped bring it to life.

Every artist has their favourites. Some are expensive pieces of specialist equipment, others are homemade, inherited, rescued from the garage or borrowed from the kitchen drawer. Over time these objects become trusted companions, helping solve creative problems, opening new possibilities and, occasionally, creating a few unexpected challenges along the way.

Sometimes inspiration begins with nothing more than a cup of tea.

For Sharlene Hasler, the humble teabag has become an unlikely canvas. Rather than tossing it into the compost, she carefully washes and dries the delicate paper before creating tiny, whimsical drawings and paintings upon it. Different teas stain the paper with subtle variations of colour, giving each piece its own unique character before she even begins to draw. It was an idea she discovered while watching artists on YouTube during the pandemic, but it quickly became something much more meaningful—a reminder that beauty can often be found in the things we routinely throw away.

Above: Andrea Ventling uses silver leaf as the basis of her underwater themed paintings.

While Sharlene transforms the ordinary into something precious, Andrea Ventling begins with a surface that is anything but ordinary.

Many viewers are surprised to discover the shimmering glow in her underwater-inspired paintings doesn't come from metallic paint, but from layers of imitation silver leaf. After preparing her boards, she painstakingly applies and polishes the silver leaf before introducing transparent inks across its smooth, non-absorbent surface. Water and alcohol encourage the inks to flow and drift, creating luminous backgrounds that evoke the movement of light beneath the sea. Through a careful subtractive process, schools of fish slowly emerge before darker inks bring them into focus. It is a technique that rewards patience at every stage, with each layer contributing to the remarkable luminosity that has become a signature of her work.

Sometimes, however, the favourite tool isn't one that adds colour—it transforms it.

For both Karena de Pont and Alysn Midgelow-Marsden, heat is an essential part of the creative process, although their finished works couldn't look more different.

Above: Karena de Pont in her Mahurangi West studio using her gas burning to burn the cedar boards and paint in her Burnt Offerings series.

Karena's studio is home to an object more commonly found in a workshop than an art studio—a gas burner. It is a tool that carries both creative and personal significance. Growing up in her family's panel beating business, the sound of a gas torch is deeply nostalgic, recalling long days spent in the workshop as a teenager. Years later, that familiar flame found its way back into her life through her Burnt Offerings series.

Inspired by architecture, richly textured paint and the Japanese timber-preserving tradition of Yakisugi (Shou Sugi Ban), she uses intense heat to burn painted cedar panels. As the flames move across the surface, thick acrylic paint bubbles, cracks and shifts in colour while the timber beneath chars into dramatic textures. Every panel becomes an exercise in surrender, where the fire itself becomes a collaborator in the creative process. Close at hand sits another indispensable tool—a simple spray bottle of water. While it may lack the romance of the gas burner, it has saved more than one artwork from becoming little more than a pile of ashes when the flames have become just a little too enthusiastic.

Across Mahurangi to Tawharanui, Alysn's collection of favourite tools reads like the inventory of an engineering workshop. Heat guns, soldering irons, welding torches, plasma cutters, kilns, plumbing torches and even an everyday household iron all play important roles in her practice. For Alysn, heat isn't simply about burning; it is about transformation. It allows her to bend, fuse, colour, distort, mould and reshape an extraordinary range of materials, revealing possibilities that simply wouldn't exist without it.

Although their artistic practices take very different paths, Karena and Alysn are united by this shared fascination with transformation through heat. That unexpected connection has become the inspiration behind their upcoming joint exhibition, Burnt Offerings, opening at the Mangawhai Artists Gallery from 11–24 September—a celebration of two artists whose work demonstrates just how differently the same elemental force can be harnessed.

Perhaps that's the real lesson hidden inside every artist's toolbox. The brushes, pencils and paints are only the beginning. The most valuable tools are often the ones discovered through curiosity, experimentation and lived experience. They might be a discarded teabag, a sheet of shimmering silver leaf, a welding torch, a gas burner—or simply the willingness to ask, "I wonder what would happen if...?"

It is that spirit of exploration, more than any single tool, that keeps artists making, questioning and discovering. And sometimes, the most unexpected tools become the ones we simply couldn't create without.