VILAURA x Ray Haydon

Each month, Boutique Connection sponsors Sanderson Contemporary Art’s exhibition openings.

This is a collaboration of wine and art pairing where we pair a handcrafted New Zealand wine with the artist’s hero piece. The project explores how taste and texture can echo a visual experience and perhaps even enhance it.

I’m exploring the non-verbal dialogue between art and wine and pairing each artist’s hero piece with a wine that echoes its mood, energy, and emotion.

The aim is to translate visual expression into taste, inviting viewers to experience the artwork through another sensory lens. Each match is intuitive and collaborative, celebrating both the artist’s vision and the craft of our boutique producers.

Ray Haydon

Ray Haydon is a contemporary New Zealand artist whose work explores form, movement, and emotional energy through abstraction. His practice is intuitive and expressive, often inviting the viewer to experience feeling before meaning.

I met Ray over a year ago, but I had never seen his work out in the wild before! It wasn’t until 2025 that I noticed one of his elegant works appear on New Zealand’s Best Homes with Phil Spencer (Season 2, Episode 1). Featured in the Hahei House designed by Paul Clarke of Studio2, Ray’s sculpture feels almost inseparable from the timber architecture almost as though it belongs to the house itself. While I was disappointed that Phil didn’t pause to acknowledge the piece, I felt a quiet thrill in recognising it instantly as Ray’s work.

Spring

Spring has a sense of lift and release in the work and is a visual expression of freedom and optimism. Ray has spoken about his enthusiasm for green as a new colour when creating the piece, a sense of freshness.

The work feels alive… buoyant.

It doesn’t sit heavily in a space; instead, it draws the eye upward, suggesting growth, motion, and the promise of something new. When asked to translate the work into another sense, Ray, a man of few words, promptly described it like drinking champagne… effervescent.

VILAURA - Marlborough Rosé Extra Brut Rosé Méthode Traditionnelle2022

The wine paired with Spring was the VILAURA 2022 Marlborough Rosé, disgorged in Spring and perfect for this artwork.

VILAURA is an independent New Zealand sparkling house founded outside the constraints of corporate winemaking. In just a few years, they’ve made a significant impact onf the local wine scene, collecting gold medals, trophies, and multiple Wine of the Show awards.

What connects Spring and VILAURA Rosé isn’t just effervescence…it’s energy.

Both the artwork and the wine move upward. Both feel light yet intentional. Both are expressions of independence and optimism, freshness and freedom, made with care and conviction rather than excess.

Together, they speak the same language … one of renewal, lift, and quiet joy. A pairing that doesn’t try to impress, but instead invites you to pause, look up, and feel uplifted.

- Renée Dale

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RAY HAYDON
Seventy Five

11th Nov - 7th Dec 2025

Sanderson are pleased to present the exhibition Seventy Five by Ray Haydon. Celebrating his seventy fifth year the exhibition explores the artist's dynamic and varied oeuvre spanning over two decades.

Haydon’s practice is celebrated for its deep engagement with the physical and conceptual properties of space. His works are held in many private collections worldwide, and have featured in major sculpture exhibitions in Aotearoa including NZ Sculpture OnShore, Shapeshifter Wellington, NZ Sculpture on the Gulf, and the Aotearoa Art Fair Sculpture Court. Haydon’s works have been featured in publications including Art News, Art New Zealand, ArtZone, The New Zealand Herald, Urbis, Denizen and Sothebys magazine.

 
Read more here.

Amoise x Julia Holderness

Each month, Boutique Connection sponsors Sanderson Contemporary Art’s exhibition openings.

This is a collaboration of wine and art pairing where we pair a handcrafted New Zealand wine with the artist’s hero piece. The project explores how taste and texture can echo a visual experience and perhaps even enhance it.

I’m exploring the non-verbal dialogue between art and wine and pairing each artist’s hero piece with a wine that echoes its mood, energy, and emotion.

The aim is to translate visual expression into taste, inviting viewers to experience the artwork through another sensory lens. Each match is intuitive and collaborative, celebrating both the artist’s vision and the craft of our boutique producers.

Aster

Julia described her hero piece Aster, as:

“reassuringly domestic but quietly radical in its reclaiming of craft and feminine creativity".

The wine I’ve chosen reflects that tenderness: textural and comforting, with a nostalgic warmth and nurturing feeling. It’s a wine that feels familiar and homely, much like Aster itself… a reminder that the simplest memories often hold the deepest emotional weight.

Amoise

I immediately thought of the Amoise Chenin Blanc 2024 - a wine that feels equally familiar yet quietly radical in its craft. Chenin Blanc is a wine that is synonymous with apple skin.  There’s something deeply domestic and familiar about its flavour. Could there be anything more nostalgic than helping mum to peel granny smiths for an apple stew, and nibbling on the skins? Simple moments that carry both nostalgia and warmth.

Amoise Chenin Blanc 2024 is a wine that carries a sense of quiet familiarity. There is something warm, domestic, and deeply human about it. Chenin Blanc is synonymous with apple skin: that simple, nostalgic flavour of helping nana peel Granny Smiths for a stew, nibbling the curls of green as if it was a daughter’s quiet duty. It’s humble, textural, and full of memory.

Amoise embraces that same honest craft. Foot-crushed fruit, a vineyard-born pied de cuve starter, and a low-intervention approach give the wine a gentle texture that mirrors the hand-made world Julia creates.

Winemaker Amy Farnsworth works with a kind of radical sensitivity herself: minimal sulphites, natural ferment, and techniques that can be risky if mishandled yet in her hands, they become quietly brilliant.

Like ‘Aster’, the wine feels both familiar and inventive, rooted in tradition yet confidently its own.

- Renée Dale

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JULIA HOLDERNESS The Room at Ashenby

11th Nov - 7th Dec 2025
Opening - Thursday 13th November, 5.30-6.30pm

Sanderson are pleased to present the exhibition The Room at Ashenby, featuring a new body of works by Julia Holderness.

In her latest exhibition at Sanderson, Holderness presents a collection of new ceramics alongside selected watercolours from her studio archive — a space hovering between memory and invention. The scene feels familiar yet faintly out of time, like a quiet corner from Monk’s House or Charleston; filled with vessels, books, painted furniture, and soft afternoon light. Decoration of the vases and hand-painted tiles becomes both reverie and research — a way of thinking through pattern, colour, and form. In their company, The Room at Ashenby becomes a site for imagination and memory: to settle, rearrange itself, and set out again.

Read more here.

Collaboration Wines x Natasha Wright

Each month, Boutique Connection sponsors Sanderson Contemporary Art’s exhibition openings.

This is our inaugural collaboration of wine and art pairing where we pair a handcrafted New Zealand wine with the artist’s hero piece. The project explores how taste and texture can echo a visual experience and perhaps even enhance it.

I’m exploring the non-verbal dialogue between art and wine and pairing each artist’s hero piece with a wine that echoes its mood, energy, and emotion.

The aim is to translate visual expression into taste, inviting viewers to experience the artwork through another sensory lens. Each match is intuitive and collaborative, celebrating both the artist’s vision and the craft of our boutique producers.

Handful

For Natasha’s hero piece Handful, I was drawn to its quiet strength and sense of generosity … the way it holds something both tender and deliberate.

The wine I’ve chosen mirrors that balance: textural yet restrained, layered with warmth but grounded in subtle tension. It’s a wine that unfolds slowly, inviting reflection, much like Natasha’s work …a reminder that what we hold, and how we hold it, shapes the story we share.

Argent

Like Handful, Argent carries a dark brooding energy beneath its calm surface. Layers of black fruit, leather, and spice unfold slowly, balanced by fine tannins and quiet precision.

Winemaker Julz, whose time in Napa shaped her belief that “smallness is not a barrier but an asset,” brings a deft touch with oak and a gentle sensitivity to balance. Inspired by the parallels between art and wine, she has crafted a wine that is dense and powerful yet surprisingly light on its feet.

- Renée Dale

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NATASHA WRIGHT - Main Character

Opening Wednesday 15th October, 6-8pm
15th Oct - 9th Nov 2025

Sanderson are pleased to present the exhibition Main Character, featuring a new body of works by Natasha Wright.

The opening will take place on Wednesday 15th October 6-8pm, with wines from Boutique Connection and cheeses from Kāpiti. All Welcome.

Wright (b.1987 Aotearoa, New Zealand) is a New Zealand born artist based in New York City. Wright’s practice explores and redresses the depiction of woman-as-subject throughout history. Her large-scale paintings fuse figuration and abstraction in intricately layered compositions; referencing traditional modes of portraiture within contemporary contexts…

Read the full exhibition text by Evangeline Riddiford Graham here