Lighthouse artist sheds some light
Queens Wharf work unveiled after 2013 commission
Artist Michael Parekowhai has broken his silence ahead of tonight’s unveiling of his controversial The Lighthouse sculpture.
It i s the first time Parekowhai, regarded as one of New Zealand’s leading contemporary artists, has given an interview about the art work commissioned by real estate firm Barfoot & Thompson in 2013 to celebrate 90 years of successful business in Auckland .
The firm gave $ 1 million toward the The Lighthouse is unveiled tonight at 7pm on Queens Wharf. The public can explore the work by looking in windows, doors and climbing the staircase. Guides will be available to answer questions. project, the largest monetary gift for a single artwork in New Zealand, and anonymous donors made up a $ 500,000 funding shortfall. Parekowhai also pared back some of the costs of the 1950s family home with a wooden exterior and cavernous fibreglass interior peppered with neon light installations and a statue of Captain James Cook.
The house i s surrounded by timber decking which brings to mind a jetty and old world sailing ships.
Viewers walk around the house and look into its windows, positioned lower than in a conventional home, or climb stairs to one side of the structure. Up there is a bigger window into the house as well as good views of the city and Waitemata Harbour.
At the unveiling on Thursday night, about a dozen protesters turned up to draw attention to Auckland housing issues.
Parekowhai would not be drawn on whether the project offered any sort of commentary about the city’s housing crisis. He said it was an art work and up to those who viewed and experienced the work to interpret.
He said dealing with negative coverage and commentary about the sculpture was difficult and, as an artist, all he could do was to keep work- ing and let the art do the talking.
Negotiating with the various project stakeholders and establishing working relationships was probably the trickiest part of the process, but other than saying it became quite complicated, Parekowhai won’t elaborate. However, he acknowledged that makes creating public art exciting. “For all the controversy public art attracts and the hard work associated with it, it’s exciting for me and, I think, any artist,” he said. “Public art has the potential to add to our experience of the city and the way we look, feel and think about it.” He said that when he got the commission, he visited the site and thought about what would best fit the terms. These included being an eyecatching design, with the appeal to draw people to Queens Wharf. He immediately thought of a house — “a simple modest house that everyone would recognise and that had a huge amount of social, political and cultural history.”
He didn’t want to create another tall structure which would compete with existing city buildings. He wanted something on a human scale, which suggested human activity and humanity.
His homework included research on Southern Hemisphere star constellations, which appear in the waterfront sculpture in the form of neon lights.
One change forced on him at an early stage in the project involved the use of Venetian glass chandeliers.
He said as with creating all art, it’s a process where decisions about what to include and omit and how to craft a piece changed as work progresses.
Instead of a chandelier, the house interior now features constellations made from neon.
The house was built around Cook — there’d be no way to get him through the front door or any of the windows — and the weather delayed getting the sculpture on to the site. It had to be taken by barge from a studio on Hamer St, in the Wynyard Quarter, to Queens Wharf and a king tide was needed for that.
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