News and Events

Apologies for people looking for my latest work, it’s all in my studio and I will release some of it bit by bit, but most of it later this year. Probably at MAORI MARKet on October 8-11 of this year. MAORI MARKet will feature the best of contemporary Maori art at the new Te Rauparaha Arena in Porirua City.

It will be bigger and better than both the San Francisco 'Maori art meets America' project which did not include paintings, as well as the MAORI MARKet 2007 in Wellington City which was a smaller venue. Two of the Major overseas guest artists feature the Haida Indian fashion designer Dorothy Grant, and the renowned Hopi Indian painter and sculptor Dan Namingha. Apart from the painters, sculptors, fashion designers, weavers, clay workers, there will be a special focus on the Maori film industry featuring the actors, writers, and directors.

I have promised to send some work to the Spirit Wrestler gallery in Vancouver for both their stock and small treasures exhibition later in the year. I am working on a number of series, one being 'Forgotten Warriors' which is inspired by those soldiers who went to war and never returned, no children, no relatives, and forgotten.

This was inspired by a CD sent to me by the Mohawk poet Janet Rogers. It has a Native chant called forgotten warriors and is a very moving sound when you close your eyes.

It reminded me of the many Maori warriors who went out to protect their people only to be taken prisoner, killed by their Maori captors, and their heads dried and sold to the British, French, Germans, Scottish, Dutch, Americans, and eventually for display in their museums.

I am also developing the series of 'Maori Clowns', which I started at Evergreen College in Washington State some five years ago. I have already completed a series on this subject before and see the clown as a universal figure that mediates between the sanity, wisdom, kindness, cruelty, and all the great and bad things that are happening in the world today. So the clown sees all joy and sadness at the same time.

The final series is about my ancestral mountain Taranaki and a day I spent driving around it on New Years Eve 2008/09. I see the Mountain Taranaki as my ancestral house where it has witnessed and contains all my history on my mother’s side and part of my father’s side.

So my plans for 2009, in addition to my first priority to love and support my family, are to complete the following:

current series of paintings;

series of small carvings for casting in gold and silver;

set of 100 drawings;

ten stone sculptures;

writing my third book;

five articles on contemporary Maori artists;

sincerely wish for a more peaceful world.

I think on top of my work at Porirua City Council that’s enough for the year.

Darcy Nicholas