Helen Kedgley

Helen Joan Kedgley (born in 1948 in Wellington) is a retired New Zealand art curator and gallery director, who remains active in arts governance. She is the twin sister of New Zealand politician Sue Kedgley and wife of retired diplomat and broadcaster Chris Laidlaw.

Along with her sister Sue, Kedgley grew up in Wellington and attended Samuel Marsden Collegiate School and Victoria University of Wellington where she earned a Bachelor of Arts majoring in politics.

After a year studying at the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland Kedgley moved to Paris with her husband, diplomat Chris Laidlaw, and studied fine art and art history, graduated from the École du Louvre with a diploma in art history and from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts with an advanced diploma in fine arts.

Kedgley and Laidlaw travelled extensively for his diplomatic career for two decades, with Kedgley taking several arts-related roles as they moved about, including as a designer at the Science Museum in Oxford and at the African National Gallery in Zimbabwe.

Kedgley curated more than 50 exhibitions at Pātaka, including The Eternal Thread – The Changing Art of Maori Weaving, a partnership with Toi Māori Aotearoa and Tourism New Zealand, which was launched in San Francisco and toured the west coast of America and the 2008 exhibition Samoa Contemporary, the first large-scale exhibition of contemporary Samoan art. She remains active in a range of governance roles, including:

Trustee, New Zealand Portrait Gallery Trustee, Blumhardt Foundation Trustee, Pātaka Foundation Trustee, Wellington Sculpture Trust