Speaking about Te Wahoroa ki te Ao Maarama

Hamiltonians who visit Lake Rotoroa for a walk, or to feed the ducks, will have noticed Lonnie Hutchinson’s prominent sculpture at the entranceway.

Hutchinson, a multi-media artist was in the city this week to speak at the annual Spark festival, said the Te Wahoroa ki Te Ao Maarama sculpture weighs five tons and is made out of corten steel, an alloy that develops a stable rust-like appearance if exposed to the weather.

The sculpture,  commissioned by MESH Sculpture Trust, is Hutchinson’s  first large-scale public artwork. It took 240 hours of welding and finishing and 280 hours of cutting and rolling.

“I was absolutely thrilled with it. The sculpture is definitely Maori and that’s very important for me, that’s why I  used the mangopare kowhaiwhai pattern because it’s really well known and the association it has with water.

“From a bird’s eye view looking down on the sculpture it looks like a koura and there used to be freshwater crayfish in the lake. Even though we can’t see it at the scale we are to the scale of the sculpture, the spirit world can definitely see it from any height they want to,”  Hutchinson said.

“I’ve enjoyed it at Spark week, this is like having a little holiday for me, quite a privilege to be here and to hear the korero of other practitioners.”

Hutchinson was brought up in a Catholic family where her first piece of art for public display was displayed in church.

Hutchinson admires New Zealand artists Michael Parekowhai and Lisa Reihana along with  South African Marlene Dumas.

 Parekowhai’s recent work Tongue of the Dog stands outside the Waikato Museum.

 “I love the sculpture and his work,”  Hutchinson said.

 “I quite like modernist art and modernist architecture.

 “I suppose the art that I identify has to resonate in my body somewhere, I have to feel it, when I feel it, I feel it. There is art out there where I don’t get that feeling, I don’t feel that I can develop a relationship with it so I have to move on.”