Holli McEntegart
Holli McEntegart is a Pākehā (Irish Gaelic, Ulster Scots, English) interdisciplinary artist whose practice moves between social practice, fiber, performance, and text. Grounded in the raw reality of daily life, her methodology rejects rigid productivity to embrace the chaos, grief, and labor of caregiving. Following studies at Carnegie Mellon, a Skowhegan residency, and training as a doula, she returned to Aotearoa to develop work at the intersection of art and mothering. Her studio practice is anchored in domestic spaces like the kitchen table, a site modeled by her artist mother, Mandy Thomsett-Taylor, as an essential place for making.
McEntegart views caregiving and mother-work as radical acts of protest against capitalist demands, treating lived care as a primary material. Through her ongoing initiative, the Inhabit Project, she occupies urban spaces to cultivate warmth and community exchange, making visible the labor of caring for children, elders, and the whenua. Aligning her fluid practice with wai (water) and te taiao, her work demands presence in moments of raw vulnerability, centering relationality to honor the complex ecosystems of care.
"My vision of motherhood and the labor of care-work is radical, it is my grandest and greatest protest – a way of making through, and out of my experience, rather than about it."
– Holli McEntegart
