2025, Precarious was an Island

Single channel digital video with original atmos. Exhibited in Dialogues in Video Art, Works from the Chartwell Collection and Elam Artists, George Fraser 21 – 29 August 2025

This show was the culmination of several months of process, practice and wānanga at Te Pūaha o Waikato – Port Waikato from October 2024 to February 2025. The artists engaged in various ways to observe how the ecology at Port Waikato exists; as a rapidly shifting landscape, as a home, as a site of enquiry for learning…

2025, A Sapling to Tie

Single channel digital video with original soundtrack, 9 min 08 sec, produced for the 2025 Masons Screen Commission. Commissioned by Wellington City Council and programmed by CIRCUIT Artists Moving Image.

“Known to bury canvases in the earth, to treat a concrete pavement like an archaeological site, to imagine electric, massive geologies, the aboveground nature of A Sapling to Tie zooms out from Tozer’s often-micro approaches. But it is still about earthly materials as vibrant, lively matter entangled in fierce, underground networks—trees that have existed for hundreds of years, the dirt and rock for millions. Her interest in deep, geological time now encompasses genealogical time, intimate time, the time over a summer, or a day, or the 10-minute duration of the video…

2024, Tidelines and Islands

Single channel digital video, 14 min 57 sec, exhibited at ABSTRAXT ABSTRAXT (2024), a survey of women artists working in abstraction in Aotearoa today.

An old family photo album left to the elements on a basement floor. The affects of decay, not usually acceptable in art or archival objects, are instead celebrated as fundamental participants in rampant, leaky ecologies. The productive womb of the ground composes and decomposes…

2024, Erotic Geologies

Edge-blended two projector digital video installation with original soundtrack, 15min 10sec, exhibited at Gow Langsford, Onehunga, September – October 2024. 

“With Erotic Geologies, Nat Tozer continues her artistic inquiry into the ground and the underground on an impressive scale. Drawing from a complex myriad of conceptual sources encompassing science fiction, te ao Mãori, and Maori and Greek mythology, Tozer digs into the contemporary relevance of the ground and the knowledge that lies below. Doing so, she subverts Western, anthropocentric concepts of knowledge, ownership and time to proffer an alternative ecology…

2023, Is it a rock, is it a mirror

Single channel digital video with original soundtrack, 3 min 33 sec, produced for The Metamodern in Literature, Art, Education + Indigenous Cosmologies: An Interdisciplinary Symposium, at Auckland’s University of Technology (2023).

“I have acted badly but I want to collect these stones now. It’s an intemperate force within me. Aesthetics. Primarily a picture, depicting life… what kind of life? Can you see, the representation? and all the tumbling, multiplying affiliations that you can witness?…

2023 – ongoing, Buried

A ongoing series of material investigations exhibited in various group shows.

“Nat’s suite of linen, are haunting surfaces of patina and decay that remind us that the past can be sensed physically…

2022, Medium Continued…

Medium Continued reveals complex, distinct, multiple and interconnected continua through the matter accumulated in the making of this work: Medium cont. crystalline carbon in graphite powder form, pulped Fabriano 240gsm acid-free paper from ‘forests responsibly managed respectful of environmental, social and economic standards’, laundry tub lint, an emerald matrix rough mineral specimen (to help open…

2021, Onepanea

A 110-metre-long x 13-metre-high wall made up of 8,500 individually programmable LED lights.

The Lightship Award funded the presentation of this open-air work at The Ports of Auckland, curated by Bridget Riggir-Cuddy.

“Assembling languages that are human, nonhuman, those in everyday use and those less in currency, Onepanea works through a linguistic strata of The Lightship’s place…

2021, Companion Pieces

Acid free archival paper offered to a snail farm.

“Tozer’s creative gesture is economical, the snails digest, reconstitute and pigment the paper. Surrealists regarded snails as usefully creepy and disjunctive, but these slow-moving hermaphrodites offer another way to consider time, and motherhood…

2020, Footpath Fossils (breathe)

Single channel digital video with original soundtrack, 5 min 06 sec, a contemplation of deterioration, and an exploration of meaningful production as a subset of care.

Small poetic moments of urban decay ripple out, visible through the ever-expanding mask of concrete—the mark of empire building since Roman times, now exposed for interpretation.

2020, Footpath Fossils

Casts of broken footpaths near and around Karangahape Rd, Tāmaki Makaurau preserve markings from tools and previous layers of broken grout.

The lockdowns brought repair and construction of the footpath to a halt. During this lull in productivity and progress casts were collected to admire the well-used areas we travel through, to acknowledge and contemplate the beauty of worn complexities, and explore the idea that meaningful production should be a subset of care…

2020, Every existent in the world is in my room right now

Single channel digital video with original soundtrack, 6 min 45 sec.

“Each particle of dust carries with it a unique vision of matter, movement, collectivity, interaction, affect, differentiation, composition, and infinite darkness.” — Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia

The interior life of lockdown was a series of small rooms. At home. In the house. Various combinations. Rooms. Walls made of paper. Losing things. Roof appreciation. The noise plateau. Children. Dust. Lull burn. Sleep. Small high window in my room licking dust. A portal to other worlds…