The inaugural Common Material brought together four of Wellington’s leading fashion labels while marking City Gallery’s first public opening in more than two years and signalling the beginning of a broader vision for a biennial that celebrates the city’s creative culture.
This past weekend, central Wellington became the stage for a new gathering of creative minds. The inaugural edition of Common Material, a platform dedicated to local design, assembled four of the city’s leading fashion labels—Twenty Seven Names, Kowtow, Yu Mei and JPalm—within City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi. For the first time in over two years, the gallery opened its doors to the public, marking a significant return for both the building and the community it serves.
Led by Yu Mei founder Jessie Wong and City Gallery Wellington Director Charlotte Davy, with art direction from Seb McLauchlan and Johannes Bay, and spatial design by Cheshire Architects, the event is shaped by a collaborative vision.
“The spatial design of Common Material leverages the inherent magic of creative work – the generative power to bring into being. Using scaffold-based structures and readily available ‘common’ materials, the exhibition environment brings together diverse designers within a series of spaces shaped in response to the event’s curatorial themes,” says lead spatial designer, Kate Glasson from Cheshire Architects.
“Both practical and symbolic, the spatial design acts as a flexible framework that supports display, communication, and movement while creating a cohesive identity across the exhibition. Its materiality and underlying philosophy reflect the energetic, transformative, and constructive spirit of this inaugural biennial event, and the creative culture of Pōneke Wellington”.
“Wellington produces an extraordinary concentration of talent. We see this event as a way to help grow our creative industry here — and the ambition is that in two years’ time, we return with a wider group of design practitioners and a true biennial on our hands,” says Jessie Wong
The vision extends beyond fashion. Jessie’s hope is that Common Material will lay the groundwork for a recurring Wellington Biennial—one that, in two years, welcomes furniture designers, typographers, architects, jewellers, ceramicists and the wider community of practitioners who have shaped Wellington’s creative landscape and carried it onto the international stage.
City Gallery will reopen its doors permanently in October 2026 with a Cornelia Parker survey. For now, Common Material marks the moment Wellington’s creative community is welcomed back into the gallery, returning to a space that has long been a home for the city’s artistic energy.
