Kauri Ora Mauri Ora / Whangarei Art Museum / 9 June – 17 July 2017
Kauri Ora Mauri Ora brings together work by artists from across Northland and beyond to explore the complexity of our relationship with this tree and its forest.
A healthy kauri forest is a wealth of diverse life, a delicate ecological network of interdependence, within which the kauri tree is a keystone species. Able to grow to ancient age and massive scale, kauri have the ability to modify the land on which they live. Around and on the kauri a host of other species live and thrive, some of them only found in this association. Late to this relationship, people have also flourished in Aotearoa/New Zealand, briefly prospering from our relationship with kauri, though at a cost to our landscape which we seek now to redress. Once a powerful presence across Northern Aotearoa, from Waikato to Cape Reinga, kauri forest now exists in scattered fragments and as a legend in the imaginations of the people. Nowhere is this history more potent than in Northland where a handful of ancient giants still stand and young kauri strive for survival, while the ghost of their kin haunt the landscape.
Kauri ki uta, Kauri ki tai – May Kauri once again flourish from hilltop to the sea.
