Wendy Neale is a furniture designer and a sculptor – two modes of creative practice which respectively foreground function and form. These are boundaries that this artist enjoys blurring – her furniture moves towards the sculptural and her sculpture references the real. She is developing a reputation for her diverse use of materials, from recycled timber to crocheted copper, and work infused by a whimsical wit.

A Fine Arts graduate from the University of Tasmania, in 2001, she returned to New Zealand to take up a position as Lecturer in Furniture Design and Course Co-ordinator at UCOL in Palmerston North. In 2003, she moved to Waiheke Island in the Hauraki Gulf, a half-hour ferry trip from Auckland, to focus full-time on her own practice and to teach at Unitec. Now working from her studio and at Massey University in Wellington, Neale, who has shown work in New Zealand, Australia and France, is building up a solid exhibition history and cementing a reputation for carefully crafted handmade furniture and sculptural objects produced for exhibition, design stores and on commission.