The pioneers of cryptoart in New Zealand peeled away from the norms of waiting to be picked by a gallery, and created their own opportunities. MintFace (Line 0) onboarded the very first artists during lockdown. Dom Baker (Line 203) led the international expedition putting Aotearoa on the map each year since, with gallery spaces in New York and then Miami. Little Art (Line 43) brought together artists for a domestic show in Auckland, and then MintFace (Line 0) brought the tokenized art from the cloud into its first permanent home at The Line gallery in Hastings, New Zealand.
Meanwhile in the South Island, 328 (Line 482) is leading the revolution through his art adventures on the Tezos blockchain. Zoe Louise (Line 398) has inscribed her poignant flower paintings on Bitcoin for permanence and legacy. Sarah C (Line 261) is pioneering new methods of virtual travel to see architecture via AI, mirroring her own IRL exploration as a former Air New Zealand pilot. There are more... these are the collective that began it all and never stopped believing.
Painting on Ethereum
Photography on Ethereum
Carving on the Blockchain
AI Architecture
Painting on Bitcoin
Photography on Tezos
LINE 0 · PAINTING ON ETHEREUM
MintFace
MintFace (Line 0) is a crypto-artist and founder of The Line, working from New Zealand while making work for a global crypto art audience. The practice moves between painting, photography, AI collaboration, and on-chain editions... all treated as a single narrative told through different instruments... and unified by an insistence on connection as both subject and method.
Since 2023, painting has become the anchor. An immediate, bodily medium valued for what cannot be forecast, where a work begins with feeling rather than idea and is resolved only when a state of stillness appears. The blockchain functions as legacy infrastructure... a way of recording personal history with a timestamp to help future generations navigate their own desire for identity.
MintFace resists typecast aesthetics in favour of an umbrella story. The output is organised as canon and experiments, where the canon holds the inner charge of the work and experiments open new doors in public view. Across both, the aim is restrained and difficult: to offer a moment of peace suspended in time, and a contemporary container for what cannot be neatly resolved.
LINE 43 · PHOTOGRAPHY ON ETHEREUM
Little Art
Keri Little is an Auckland-based photographer with over 18 years' experience working across portraiture, commercial photography, and digital art. She is widely recognised for capturing presence and authenticity, particularly with leaders, founders and professionals who want to be seen clearly and confidently.
Alongside her commercial work, Little Art (Line 43) is an established NFT artist whose macro liquid photography explores motion and transformation. Her work captures fleeting physical reactions -- drops of liquid, pigment and movement frozen in time -- then translated into curated NFT collections collected internationally.
Her creative practice blends technical precision with curiosity, drawing from both scientific experimentation and artistic intuition. This duality allows her to move seamlessly between photographing people and abstract subjects measured in milliseconds. Keri's work sits at the intersection of human presence and material transformation.
LINE 203 · CARVING ON THE BLOCKCHAIN
Dom Baker
Dominique Baker is a Bay of Islands-based artist whose practice bridges traditional visual art and contemporary digital expression. A graduate of Auckland University of Technology with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (2008), Dom Baker (Line 203) works primarily with painting, carving and printmaking, drawing on Maori and European heritage, street-art influences, and a deep connection to place. Her work explores whakapapa, identity and continuity, often combining figurative forms with carved and cosmic motifs that speak to ancestry and collective memory.
In recent years, Baker has expanded her practice into the NFT space, founding and curating NFT Aotearoa -- an artist-led initiative bringing Aotearoa-based artists into international digital and physical exhibitions, including shows in Miami during Art Basel, New York during NFT NYC, and via digital billboards in Times Square and Broadway.
Whether working on wood, canvas or blockchain, her practice is grounded in cultural continuity, kaitiakitanga and mana.
LINE 261 · ARTIFICIAL ARCHITECTURE
Sarah C
Sarah Caldwell is an award-winning New Zealand-based photographic artist whose work explores the intersection of structural design and digital evolution. Specialising in architecture, Sarah C (Line 261)'s practice is rooted in a fascination with the beauty of symmetry, geometric precision, and the balance found in natural reflections.
Her technical excellence has been widely recognised by the New Zealand Institute of Professional Photography (NZIPP), where she was named Commercial Photographer of the Year (2019) and Rookie of the Year (2018). An early adopter of blockchain technology, Sarah began minting her work as NFTs in July 2021, and began integrating Generative AI into her workflow in early 2023. By blending traditional lens-based photography with Photoshop, she transforms physical structures into new, surrealist forms -- leading to exhibitions in Auckland and an international showcase in New York during NFT NYC 2024.
LINE 398 · PAINTING ON BITCOIN
Zoe Louise
Zoe Louise (Line 398), sometimes signing off as MelzieQ, is a multidisciplinary artist from New Zealand. Starting her career with paint on canvas, Zoe now works with a range of physical and digital tools in her Cambridge studio to bring ideas to life on the Bitcoin blockchain. Often exploring themes of death and life, connection and great change, Zoe's work and decisions are shaped from loss and love in motherhood.
Zoe's practice utilises the blockchain for its strength of legacy preservation, immutable story and worldwide native viewing experience. She greatly believes nothing is more powerful than art, and no town square is more appropriate than the Bitcoin ledger for truth to prevail past, present and future.
Immortalise the feeling -- it's important.
LINE 482 · PHOTOGRAPHY ON TEZOS
328
328 (Line 482) is a lens-based artist from New Zealand whose confrontational black and white photography explores the volatile relationship between nature and human destruction. His images are deliberately uncomfortable -- crafted not for aesthetic pleasure but to provoke unease, offering grainy, fragmented visions of monochromatic chaos that linger in the viewer's mind.
Beyond his photographic practice, Jesse is a dedicated collector and vocal advocate for emerging digital artists, minting on the Tezos blockchain through platforms like objkt.com. His work has gained international recognition through exhibitions at Superchief Gallery in Los Angeles, Shibuya Square in Tokyo, NFT New Zealand, NFT Aotearoa, and the Peninsula Art Auction.
His lens transforms derelict structures and forsaken landscapes into visceral examinations of impermanence, memory, and the relentless cycles that govern both natural and constructed worlds.
