Khye Hitchcock
Practice: Artist, curator, producer
Location: Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand
Pronouns: They/them
Khye Hitchcock is an artist, curator, and producer whose work sits at the intersection of art, community, and environmental care. Based in Ōtautahi Christchurch, they create and support projects that connect people with place, foregrounding the wellbeing of both communities and the natural world.
Their background spans performance, installation, writing, and curating. Across these forms, Khye’s practice is driven by social justice, queer and feminist perspectives, and a commitment to more generous, equitable ways of living together.
Art, Environment & Community
Khye’s work often responds directly to environmental issues such as freshwater degradation, climate change, and urban regeneration. Rather than treating these as abstract themes, they focus on the lived experience of people and places:
Connecting art-making with local waterways and green spaces
Designing projects that invite people to pause, reflect, and participate
Treating public spaces as sites for care, conversation, and collective imagination
Their projects frequently blur the boundaries between art, community development, and environmental action. This includes collaborations with community groups, trusts, and local organisations working to restore and re-imagine urban and river environments.
Urban Greening and Place-Making
A significant part of Khye’s practice has involved urban greening and community-led place-making in post-earthquake Christchurch.
As Director of The Green Lab (formerly Greening the Rubble), Khye led a range of projects that transformed underused or damaged urban spaces into shared green places. These projects were designed and built with local communities, and included:
Co-working and gathering spaces such as understorey
Community gardens and neighbourhood courtyards
River-edge refuges and small sanctuaries for people and wildlife
Through this work, Khye helped create spaces where people could connect with one another, with plants and trees, and with the stories of their neighbourhoods. Each site became an evolving artwork in its own right, shaped by those who used and cared for it.
Khye has also worked as a Creative Communicator with the Styx Living Laboratory Trust, developing gentle, participatory artworks that link river restoration with personal reflection. An example is Pūharakekenui Post, which placed small caches of postcards and prompts along the Styx River, inviting visitors to write, reflect, and send their responses back—creating a living archive of memories, observations, and hopes for the river.
Curating, Writing & Collaboration
Alongside their environmental and community projects, Khye has a strong curatorial and writing practice.
They have curated exhibitions that foreground collaboration, collective making, and alternative ways of occupying space. One notable example is “Making Space” at CoCA in Ōtautahi, which brought together artist collectives from around Aotearoa who were carving out physical, conceptual, and cultural spaces for themselves and their communities. Rather than presenting a static, fixed show, Making Space treated the exhibition itself as a live process, shaped by events, conversations, and shifting contributions.
As a writer, Khye has responded to performance and installation works with particular attention to embodied, sensory experience—how art feels as much as how it looks. Their essays and project texts often weave together personal reflection, critical thought, and a deep respect for the communities and environments involved.
Collaboration is central to Khye’s practice. They frequently work alongside performers, designers, community leaders, and environmental practitioners, treating each project as a shared endeavour rather than a solo statement.
Ongoing Focus & Values
Across their roles as artist, curator, producer, and facilitator, some consistent threads run through Khye’s work:
Connection to place: Treating whenua, waterways, and urban ecologies as collaborators rather than backdrops.
Community care: Designing projects that support the wellbeing of communities, especially those who are marginalised or displaced.
Queer and feminist perspectives: Centring voices and experiences that are often pushed to the margins, and challenging norms around who gets to shape public space.
Participation and co-creation: Inviting people to contribute their own stories, labour, and ideas, so that artworks grow out of collective processes.
Khye’s practice offers a vision of art as a form of hospitality: making room for others, tending to places, and opening up possibilities for kinder, more connected futures.
Sources and Further reading
Here are the main sources you can list after the Khye Hitchcock article:
• Pūharakekenui Post event listing (Humanitix): https://events.humanitix.com/puharakekenui-post
• Ōtautahi City Voices – Khye Hitchcock, Programme Director for The Green Lab (video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJyUxETR268
• The Green Lab – understorey feature: https://thegreenlab.org.nz/understorey-3/
• Cinch community directory – Green Lab (Greening the Rubble Trust) entry: https://www.cinch.org.nz/categories/a-z/u/765/entries/6109
• CoCA Toi Moroki – MAKING SPACE / Whakarite Wāhi: https://coca.org.nz/exhibitions/making-space/
• EyeContact – “Comparing Art Collectives” (review of MAKING SPACE): https://eyecontactmagazine.com/2017/06/comparing-art-collectives
• Scoop – “Making Space: a showcase of collaborative creative practice”: https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/CU1705/S00397/making-space-a-showcase-of-collaborative-creative-practice.htm
• Otago Daily Times – “Life experience motivation for supporting well-being of everyone in Christchurch”: https://www.odt.co.nz/star-news/star-our-people/life-experience-motivation-supporting-well-being-everyone-christchurch
