June 04, 2015
Ngai Tahu jeweller strikes creative gold
Ngai Tahu artist and jeweller Areta Wilkinson has received this year’s $100,000 Creative New Zealand Craft/Object Fellowship to make a body of work drawing on her recent doctoral thesis on concepts of taonga.
Her project Hine-Ahua: Absences and Presences will use gold sourced from Te Tai Poutini or the West Coast) and Otakou.
Dr Wilkinson says wearable taonga Maori were not just ornaments but also had connections to the land, to the gods, to history and legend.
They facilitated relationships, identities, politics, ethics.
She says seen from a Maori perspective gold from Papatuanuku and Te Waipounamu has a mauri or life essence.
Creative New Zealand chief executive, Stephen Wainwright, says Dr Wilkinson’s research makes a unique contribution to contemporary jewellery.
Her exhibition, Whakapaipai: Jewellery as Pepeha opens on Saturday at Objectspace in Auckland, then tours to the Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt.
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