Colour in a reef is a collaboration. It emerges from a living partnership with microscopic algae, zooxanthellae, that sustain and nourish the coral host. When the reef is challenged, this fragile alliance can fracture. Algae may be expelled, revealing the white calcium skeleton beneath, while others are taken in, offering the possibility of resilience.

Zooxanthellae Shuffle moves through this story of symbiosis, loss, and renewal. Colour gathers, intensifies and withdraws, tracing a passage from vitality to exposure, with parts responding unevenly as if the reef is negotiating its own survival.

Bleaching is not only the fading of colour, but the loss of a vital energy source on which entire ecosystems depend. Reefs sustain extraordinary marine life and shield coastlines from erosion. Their brilliance signals balance and its shifting reflects the delicate negotiation between vulnerability and resilience.

The work holds this threshold, a moment where beauty, fragility and the potential for recovery coexist.

Artist Bio

Bobbie Gray & Glenn Dawick

Bobbie Gray is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau, working across sculpture, installation and painting. Her practice transforms salvaged and diverted plastics into intricate, light-responsive forms that reimagine the natural world through a synthetic lens. Known for immersive light-based installations, Bobbie explores ecological systems, perception, and human connection, inviting audiences to reconsider their relationship with materials and the environment.

For this project, she collaborates with Auckland-based senior 3D VFX artist Glenn Dawick. With over 17 years’ experience across film and commercial industries, Glenn specialises in complex simulation and dynamics alongside modelling, animation, texturing, lighting and rendering.

Together, they merge physical sculpture and digital simulation. Glenn's projected animations activate Bobbie’s material forms, introducing movement, atmosphere and transformation. The collaboration extends Bobbie’s established light works into a new dimensional dialogue, where virtual forces interact with reclaimed matter, and the boundaries between the synthetic and the natural become fluid.