Created in the aftermath of the January 2023 floods — the most extreme rain ever to fall on Auckland — Warren Elwin’s ’Old & New’ series of collages trace the currents of his experience and reflect on the wake of all that water.

Warren Elwin has gathered memories, paper, stacks of magazines, and precious scraps of a career in advertising art direction in New York and New Zealand, materials he’s transformed into these fashionable landscapes.

The negative spaces surrounding photographs of models in W Magazine have become the elements and geography of the places that inspire him; Tuparahuia, Bland Bay; Opunga Cove; Mangawhai Heads; Matapaua and Otama Bays; Whatipu … in Aotearoa, New Zealand.

They are accidental and intentional; “I’m just as fascinated with what isn’t there as I am with what is. Painting with paper has always held particular sway over my creative output, the eventual juxtapositions building themselves through pasting in the blanks on the horizontal, then allowing them to find their vertical feet .”