Our Founder

Juliet Arnott is an occupational therapist and artist/maker. She founded Rekindle in 2010 whilst living in Auckland, and continues to run the organisation now based in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand.

She was born in 1974 in Canvastown on a farm and has since lived mostly in New Zealand other than over a decade spent in rural Scotland and England.

Juliet's practice is inclusive, often inviting the community to become makers, and to transform those under-valued material resources around them, and in doing so to value their own inner resources. In this way she works to acknowledge human wellbeing as inextricably linked to our active care of the world around us. She sees being resourceful as a crucial capability of humankind as it enables us to care for and meaningfully connect with our environment and each other. She regards unnecessary wastefulness as missed opportunities for the practice of resourcefulness. 

Alongside her work for Rekindle, Juliet is often asked to write, consult, and talk about waste, resourcefulness, post-disaster community involvement in demolition, deconstruction and reuse, and occupational therapy, amongst other things. Below are links to some of Juliet's recent work:

Radio interview with Kim Hill on Radio New Zealand

A resilient city is a resourceful city and waste is its opposite - A short essay published in The Press 2016

The Resourcefulness of Craft: Whole House Reuse - a Statement of Practice published April 2017 in The Journal of Modern Craft which is the first peer-reviewed academic journal to provide an interdisciplinary and international forum in the subject area of craft.

More haste in demolition less speed in Kaikoura recovery - A short essay published in The Press 2016

Why the big pile in the forest? : The question of demolition in post-quake Canterbury was written by Juliet for the book Once in a Lifetime: City-building after Disaster in Christchurch which was published by Freerange Press in August 2014.

Please contact info@rekindle.org.nz to reach Juliet.