Kauri Hawkins Kauri Pou Whenua, 2019
Kauri and paint 170 x 170 x 2500 mm.
Kauri Hawkins pou whenua represents the plight of the kauri tree in the Auckland region, using Waiheke Island as a backdrop – one of the last places kauri dieback has not reached.
Carved from kauri, the pou whenua reproduces a wooden street sign post. Haehae lines are carved into the wood to replicate bulldozer tread and allude to Māori carving conventions, indicative of construction and colonialism. Doubled-sided signs carry the words Ka Uri, Kauri, Cowrie and Cody. This is a breakdown of the meaning of Kauri (Ka Uri) and how it is regularly mispronounced.
Kauri Pou Whenua is a political comment on the status of kauri within two spaces. For Māori living in the Auckland region this rakau (tree) represents ancestral links to space and time through whakapapa, a taonga of upmost importance. For settlers, this tree was once seen as a resource to assist in the making of a new colony which has now become endangered in the eyes of the public 200 years later.
Jae Kang INOUTIN, 2019
Agricultural pipe, timber posts and fishing nets. 16000 x 24000 x 3000 mm.
Space, in and out, on and under, up and down, close and open. We don’t often realise how complex space is, yet we are always surrounded by it, experiencing it and breathing it in. Space also can be paradoxical and ideological. With a simple line, we define the space as ‘in and out’ but it can be reversed by where you are.
This large architectural installation of colourful fishing nets delivers a tactile and spatial experience – one that stimulates the imagination and invites interaction by touching and walking, around and through.
Using fishing nets, the most common material for this maritime industry, Kang delineates spatial zones without the use of walls, and allows viewing from either side, simultaneously promoting notions of catchment and freedom. INOUTIN plays with the question of who is trapped and who is free, where ‘in’ and ‘out’ are, and who the outsider is.
Chris Bailey Te Werowero – The Ongoing Challenge, 2018/19
Bronze, stainless steel base, 700 x 600 x 1800 mm (variable). Edition 1/3
Come with an open mind, respect for our culture and wāhi tapu (sacred places) and we will welcome you. Come lacking in these things, and we will challenge you.
For beneath the foreshore of this bay lie the bones of our ancestors, encircling this protected harbour with their presence.
Under this wharf resides the whai (stingray), our kaitiaki (guardian), and within these waters the Horopekapeka (Bronze whaler shark) guards the pathway by which you approach.
Jeff Thomson Rebecca, 2019
Corrugated iron, 7000 x 2000 x 2000 mm (mast 7000 mm) approx
Using his favoured material, corrugated iron, Jeff Thomson’s Rebecca references early NZ classic yacht designs and the long history of boats moored at Matiatia and elsewhere around the coast of Waiheke.
The subject matter and the attention to detail in construction of this yacht reflect our nation’s love of boat building and the sea. The iconic material enforces the nostalgic and quintessential Kiwi “do it yourself” attitude. It can be seen as a sophisticated advancement of the single sheet of iron, tar-caulked, tin canoe that those of a certain generation will remember from their youth. This sculpture was inspired by her namesake ‘Rebecca’, a 1902 built gaff-rigged yacht originally called Dolphin, which was restored and renamed by the late Peter Smith and his wife Jill Smith during the 1970s.
Elliot Collins Memory Castle, 2019
Scaffolding, fencing, billboard vinyl, cable ties and enamel pens. 7000 x 7000 x 5000 mm approx.
This work comprises of hundreds of memories of visitors and residents on Waiheke Island. The pennants that cover this temporary castle flutter on the breeze and signal a thought, prayer or reminder of a person, place or moment that is significant to those individuals who add their flag to the castle.
The scaffolding acts as a skeleton or sketch of a castle, a building that was traditionally made to be long lasting and solid. This castle is the inverse of that type of structure. It is transparent and momentary just like a passing memory or thought of a loved one or a past event. It questions ways of holding on to memory or ways of letting go.
The hand drawn flags made by local school children and visitors are added to the castle over the duration of Sculpture on the Gulf 2019 and reflect the value of memory that each contributor shares. Those who pass by Memory Castle will be asked to pause a moment, read a few flags and contemplate how collective memory works in an age of introversion and isolation.
Euan Lockie Future Failings, 2019
Found and recycled materials, 3400 x 2000 x 2500 mm approx.
Euan Lockie’s Future Failings greets you before you’ve even set foot on the island. It looks isolated, slightly derelict, banal in form and somehow both out of place and strangely at home, as if it has become untethered from a mooring and drifted into Matiatia Bay. The work takes the form of a Department of Conservation hut with its timeless boxy aesthetic. A DOC hut is a welcome sanctuary for a weary traveller and it provides the most rudimental form of shelter. It represents urbanisation and conservation, isolation and community, past, present and future.
Lockie’s work exists in the borderland between the playful and political. He imagines a future where rising sea levels and climate change have put pay to lifein Aotearoa as we know it. Given current concentrations and ongoing emissionsof greenhouse gases the global mean temperature and sea levels will continue to rise, oceans will get warmer and ice caps will continue to melt. Future Failings is on one hand a fantastical cabin, barely keeping afloat on the waves and on the other is a warning: make changes, pay attention, or this is the world that our tamariki might live to see. In keeping with the theme of the artwork it is constructed from found and recycled materials, much of it sourced from Waiheke Island’s waste. The location of the work is integral: like New Zealand itself it is isolated and on the periphery. Viewed against the lush backdrop of the island and the surrounding waters it reminds us how rugged and beautiful our country is and exactly how much we have to lose.
Mandy Cherry Joass Puapua Whenua (wreath and shield for the land), 2019
Recycled Luxaflex aluminium venetian blinds 12000 x 11000 x 200 mm approx.
Puapua Whenua (wreath and shield for the land) is an abstract symbolic armor, an offering of healing and protection to the earth. It invites a shift of perspective and behavior towards our environment, developing new healthier patterns, tiny repetitions, which combine to make larger change.
The work evokes the grid of raranga (weaving), the rhythm of a tukutuku panel, the patterning of a tapa cloth, the careful lines of an intricate quilt or the regimented crosses of a tapestry. A sense of shared community often accompanies the making of these kinds of taonga/heirlooms, to be handed down through generations. This sense of community expands and translates to a shared ownership of our moana (oceans) and whenua (land), creating a new community which transcends borders, cultures and generations. It took a loving community, the hands of many friends and family members along with support in the form of a recycling arrangement with Luxaflex New Zealand, to bring together the 22,000 components of ‘Puapua Whenua’.
Kereama Taepa Whuture whakairo, 2019
3d prints and mixed media, 2000 x 2000 x 300 mm.
Whuture whakairo is a play on words – ‘whuture’ referencing the future and ‘whakairo’ referencing traditional Māori carving. The installation itself presents a futuristic archaeological excavation of ‘carved’ artifacts that have been created with today’s visual language and technology linking past, present and future and questions ideas around tradition and innovation. The artifacts within the excavation have not been carved but 3D printed, taking advantage of a technology that is able to create patterns and forms that would otherwise be difficult if not impossible to create by hand. This then pushes the tradition of whakairo into new territory which I have named whakapī.
The objects that make up Whuture whakairo look traditional at first glance, however on closer inspection references from popular culture such as Apple computers and Pac Man are revealed. References to kai feature heavily, as it links the work to the adjacent sites on the island where the local iwi cultivated kumara in the past. Our traditions dictate what we should do and how we should do it. However, when considering how we can adapt to changing environments through new and innovative technologies I tend to subscribe to our oldest tradition … the tradition of innovation itself.
Tim Barlow Open Source Water Well, 2019
Laminate wood, hessian, bioplastic, mixed media. 4000 x 2500 x 2200 mm.
In his book Elixir author Brian Fagan suggests we are entering the ‘third age of water’. He claims that as ancient acquifers run dry humans will need to develop a new environmental ethos in partnership with water. We may even need to rediscover a special reverence or sacred relationship towards water.
Waiheke Island faces the potential impacts of climate change, extreme weather events and water shortages that other Pacific Island nations are having to deal with now and into the future. This sculpture explores how water and aesthetic ecosystems might collide in the future to create a new water ethos.
Tim Barlow has been creating sculptures and installations at the intersection of aesthetics and ethics, water and community since 1994. For Sculpture on the Gulf 2019 he has created a Waiheke Island inspired ‘water-well’ to suggest a way to reimagine the poetics of water with the ‘rights of nature’.
David McCracken Towards a Better World, 2019
304 stainless steel, polished and partially painted, 1100 x 1100 x 3400 mm.
This is the latest development of a body of work I began over a decade ago. Towards a Better World refers in part to the idealised illustrations that I recall from sci-fi publications of the fifties and sixties, largely aimed at young boys and which seemed to carry a literal interpretation – the rocket could actually be going to a ‘better world’. I find the forms of the early rockets and missiles irresistibly attractive as well as the aerodynamic bombs developed by Barnes Wallace during the second world war, and want to represent this attractiveness as the boyish obsession that it is. Hence the automotive glamour of polished metal and bright paint. After discovering that the V2 rockets deployed against the allies during WW2 began their development as the projects of idealistic German scientists who wanted to build vehicles for space travel, I made these morally ambiguous objects as optimistic and outward looking, with a view to a darker more sinister body of work to come.
