The Design Process

Simon has been researching and exploring Kāi Tahu visual culture for many years, and through the work of Mana Ahurea he is able to see that culture writ large on the landscape.

“Coming from my background as an artist, and being Ngāi Tahu, it’s a really big priority for me to get our Ngāi Tahu visual culture embedded within these projects, so it’s a really authentic Ngāi Tahu look and feel,” he says. “It is quite different from other iwi, and it’s really important to have that expressed.”

Capturing that visual culture is not always about replicating art created by historical Kāi Tahu – sometimes it’s about reflecting back the world they lived in. “Often it’s through materiality, thinking about things like our taonga species. Our visual culture wasn’t always expressed through the built environment, but it was expressed within the landscape, with our bone and our stone and our shells and our weaving,” says Simon. “Thinking about that, and how that fits within the landscape is something that’s quite different, but also that’s realy rich and distinctively Ngāi Tahu.”

The work of Mana Ahurea is also an unmatched opportunity for Kāi Tahu artists to use their talent to create very visible markers of cultural identity in the public domain. On another level, it’s also an opportunity for those artists to reconnect with their own whakapapa.

“Bringing our artists and designers to work within their own takiwā, maybe they haven’t grown up in this area, and they come back and connect with their whānau and work with them in ways that they haven’t been able to before,” Simon says. “So they’re doing lots of learning and growing as well, but also giving back to whānau here and in this takiwā. For me that’s a real high point, when I can help to facilitate that aspect.”

Mana Ahurea has worked with well-known Kāi Tahu artists such as Ross Hemera, Fayne Robinson, Kirsten Parkinson and of course Simon himself.