Five of the Best exhibitors, from left, Fiona Fox, Dean Moroney, Vonda Christensen, Raewyn Paterson and Sarah Horn.

EIT’s highest-achieving visual arts and design graduates showcased their diverse talents in a special exhibition recently staged at the Hastings Community Arts Centre.

Five of the Best featured works by 2011’s top visual arts student on the Bachelor of Visual Arts and Design programme Fiona Fox, top overall degree student Vonda Christensen, top design student Dean Moroney, top research student Sarah Horn and 2010 top overall degree student Raewyn Paterson.

Fox says her work – virtually a sell-out at the student’s end-of-year function – was aimed at communicating knowledge of an unconscious and primal feminine language expressed in thread and coded in hieroglyphics.

Moroney’s strongly visual work combined vibrant and dynamic motion graphics and mapping technology projected onto a perspex frame. Head phones could be used to enhance the sensory experience – the animation interacting with a live music effect.

A full-time photographer, Horn presented an edition of 20 prints and a digital projection that challenged visual perceptions of the world and invited a greater intimacy with it. At the exhibition opening, Fox, introducing the graduate work, described the images as “ephemeral poetry in motion”.

Christensen’s paintings were works of force, energy and rhythm that incorporated an underlying concern for nature and ecological balance.

A spatial design major now working part-time at EIT, Paterson also displayed work from her final degree year. A model, workboard and three panels tracked the development of her design for a flexible whanau home for her sister.

The 12-day exhibition was sponsored by EIT’s School of Arts and Design for the prize-winning visual arts and design students.

Programme coordinator Nigel Roberts said the exhibited work, never previously displayed in a venue outside EIT, demonstrated the widely ranging talents of the institute’s top graduates and the high skill levels achieved by those who gained the degree.