 OK, welkom back, team new frontiers. Really, yeah, team new frontiers. Really stoked, that's a good kiwi saying. Means happy, awesome. Stoked to share a conversation with you all and these two fine beings and what this discussion is about is the influence of art in New Zealand culture but also culture globally. And it'd be good in this session as well to reflect a little bit around the opportunities that that presents. So perhaps just handing over to you both to introduce yourselves and then we'll take it from there and have a bit of a co-creative jam session. Kia ora kaita, I'm Simon Bowden. I was born in Palmerston North, which was about two hours north of Wellington. Came to Wellington when I was 21 to study music. Yeah, I studied jazz guitar at the Wellington Conservatory of Music and then progressed to tour around the country with my band for a few years. Our biggest claim to fame being that we won the jazz album of the year in the 2001 New Zealand Music Awards. So where's Mark, we could perhaps have a jam later. As first of all then went on, I've now been working for 13 years as the Executive Director of the Arts Foundation of New Zealand Arts Foundation being a private charitable trust which is unique in New Zealand. There's a lot of those in America but in New Zealand we don't have any organisations that are not funded by government. So we're 100% private and our role is to inspire people to donate to the arts so we know a little bit about philanthropy. And like Mark we also have laureates and like Mark I get to ring artists up out of the blue five a year get $50,000 and three get $25,000 and I get to surprise them and say, look, we've got some people to get them. We've been looking, we've been watching you don't know this but we've spotted incredible talent and we would like to give you no obligations, you don't have to do anything with it, you could pay off your mortgage, you can invest it and work. $50,000 because we believe in you and they're amazing phone calls. I've had tears, I had one person who was silent for a minute so it's a complete stunned silence. And just recently we've launched a crowdfunding website called Boostive and the main purpose of this crowdfunding website is to help artists inspire and engage with audiences and I think there's quite a huge potential in this particular platform and this digital intervention which will change the relationship over time between artists and audiences which we might talk a little bit about soon. Koutu, my name is Chris Bailey. I'm a sculptor. I live on Waiheke Island. I have four daughters and two sons. I'm heavily involved in our local marae. I've been carving in the carving shed now for about ten and a half years. It's been a slow process due to funding and all of that sort of stuff for the timber and I'm involved with, I take the period of attention guys down on the marae too so I'm involved in a lot of wrap bags. So all of that, all my creative side is I've done reasonably well in it and I'm finding that a lot of the wrap bags that I work with and the weekends and that actually use it as a measurement to perhaps, instead of using sport or music or anything like that, that they could use the creative endeavours to push out of those poverty lines as well. I think that's been a really interesting observation for me as a sculptor. Kia ora. Thanks and what you just said touches on something that's really interesting and touches a boundary of where I'm really excited about art in the creative industries to be able to influence societies and the environment in really positive and powerful ways and it's why I've joined Boosters as an advisor to think about how we can nurture creatives in order to create a more equitable society. I'm just wondering, one of the questions I have for you Simon is this depth of experience with the knowledge of New Zealand art and the ecosystem and just wondering if you can give a little bit more specific context of what that looks like and where the opportunities could be for the country but also globally as a result of that. This country is alive with art. I've been following and being in my own practice and watching for about 20 years and it's transformed in the last 20 years. When I arrived in Wellington a few years ago it was a kind of a grey city. People said it was a bureaucratic city. Every two years there was a big festival and it got colour but now it's colourful every day. There is major institutions producing work all the time. There's artists working from the beginning levels and student flats. You can go and see shows with two people in the audience and one person in the show all year round, right around the country. It's like a renaissance. It would be interesting to hear if it's the same globally but it's quite an exciting time for New Zealand at the moment. Artists are doing this. Artists are creating this world through their own ambition to create and perhaps we're living in a really blessed time where there is enough resources for people to do that and enough support and infrastructure for it to happen. Not that easy sometimes. There's not enough money to buy the wood. That does happen and that happens all the time. Going back a little while, I'm really interested in this conversation about a vision for New Zealand. I think it's extraordinary in how artists can play a role in that and how perhaps it might motivate artists to connect more but thinking a while back about when we had Prime Minister Helen Clark in the Labour Government before the Government we've got at the moment and she had a vision for New Zealand. She had a vision for the arts. She in fact took the arts portfolios. We had a Prime Minister saying I'll be the Minister of the Arts and the arts rejoiced and it was on the front page and we couldn't quite believe it really but it came with this dialogue and the dialogue kind of went a little bit like this. It's okay to be an artist if you're telling New Zealand stories. At the same time she said it's okay to be on the benefit, our welfare system, if you're an artist because it's a legitimate practice because you're telling New Zealand stories and for a while all the dialogue on the arts was it's okay to be an artist because we're telling New Zealand stories but it wore thin because New Zealand artists said actually we want to be part of this global community expressing our ideas and connected internationally not just put into this box of telling New Zealand stories and in a wider context the whole telling New Zealand stories and identity started to run a little bit thin and maybe the vision that we've been hearing about today, this exploration of this new vision, this new purpose for the countries and incubating nation maybe that can be something that artists grab hold of and integrate into their practice. What do you think Rebecca? He just said I know you agree with me which I do and I mean I see really there's a couple of two kind of key arms and opportunities for artists and creative industries. One is to create the art of physical works which inspire and show a vision of what's possible a vision for the future of how we can live collectively together in a regenerative ecologically rich society and to show that vision and the other is to start co-creating solutions. So how can we innovate in a really creative way the solutions that we have and I can see that art and that creative mind is as much a part as the table as we've just heard earlier as Mark was saying it's not just about science, it's about social science, it's about creativity as far as the problem solving capacity goes. Just wanting to think as well about the inspiration which might help catapult us to that place and Chris perhaps you can give us a little bit more background and detail into your practice and what inspires and drives you to produce such magnificent work. Right, at one stage it was pretty much everything everything and everyone inspired me. Everything I heard music that inspired me but I didn't do too well. It was a mishmash of art that people couldn't really relate to. So I turned to I started finding I was walking along beaches and that on Waiheke Island and I started finding flakes these little stone flakes that didn't look like the natural terra firma of the area and through asking a lot of old people in that around the island they sort of showed me that the flakes I was finding were all these old ancient edges from the people that used to live there in bygone eras and they started showing me all these flakes that they found and these guys were in their 70s and I was really taken back by the form of these old edges and the function of them. What did they do? Why were they being made? And then around about the same time I decided that I wasn't dumb because we found out that our boy was dyslexic and I related to it. I was just being dyslexic man issues with reading and writing so I went to university and I thought ah this is going to be easy, I'll just take all the Māori papers. And then it was like grammatical papers reading and writing and so my sweetheart at the time, Sally, she basically read them all out to me and I got them and I passed them and she learned how to speak Māori. She's a parka woman. Sally Smith was awesome. At the same time that I was doing these papers I bumped into a guy called Dante Bonnaker, he was a Sicilian professor and he was whānauied into the Ngāti Kahungunu tribe and his papers were material culture so I spent a lot of time with him learning the methodology of ancient tool making techniques and it really kicked off my inspiration for once I've completed all those papers basically from then till now it's all about my creative endeavours have been about understanding and grabbing archaeological digs and pieces and putting contemporary twists on them and delivering them into now with a contemporary angle the process is quite long but it's good, really good and I've found that once I started pushing out of traditional forms and concepts and going more universal they were even loved even more that's been a real good eye opener as well I think we were talking earlier on the universal language of form so there's been a few stone symposiums I've been involved in the Sydney sculpture by the sea and a few other ones like that and people that don't speak English, the Japanese sculptors and Arabic a lot of people that just don't speak English is not their first language the first thing they get is the universal language so they walk around and instead of having to read a book about it, just catch them in the stomach they don't have to try and work it out and I think before we were talking about mathematics being a universal language and physics and all of these I think there's definitely a creative one as well and I like that the creative one and what connects assets from the past and projecting them into the future and I can see that the common thread of what allows you to do that is beauty and that language of beauty and how it touches people universally in such a powerful way I've discovered that I watched it on a documentary actually about beautiful, all these chicks all these women were seen as beautiful and all the photographers and everything were saying well symmetrical faces are beautiful so I took it back to Professor Dante Bonacca and he was saying yeah but it's the same with a lot of the archaeological forms they had symmetricality to them so that they could function better and there was a real I discovered there's a fine line between functionality and beauty like a lot of the artefacts you see, actually quite beautiful in themselves but they have a function, they have a real function one of my favourites is the, they call it a hogback ads, type 1-5 I think the archaeologist call them and they were primarily used to start a lot of the waka or to engage in the front of the hull, the inside of the hulls and the backs of the hulls because of the shape and they're really quite beautiful to look at you can almost see them, you can use them with their aerodynamic but yeah, that's just something that sort of blows my pupiu up so to speak creatively is the flax skirts that the Tautamariki were as another Kiwi colloquial saying sorry, sorry I have a dry sense of humour I've got a ton of more questions and reflections for you guys but I'd really like to give the opportunity to open things up in a co-creation session so just welcome questions, reflections well I'm excited to hear your observations Chris about Maori artists being a channel for lifting people out of poverty because I live in a place in Santa Fe, New Mexico where there has been a huge evolution over the last I don't know 30, 40 years of an annual arts market that actually has helped a lot of native people of that area and many of them earn their whole years wages in one weekend so that's exciting to me but what I was curious to ask all three of you in a sense is I'm fascinated with the role of arts for transforming culture and I heard a story from a friend who went to Berlin and she was an art dealer actually and she was stunned by the public art in Berlin and how it's been used and very systematically supported in the interest of cultural healing and advancing cultural healing and she said she was amazed at the light in that city and after two weeks of wandering around decided it was the public art so I'm curious about what New Zealand finds itself in and the need to stimulate greater leadership, greater courage, greater capacity to act without permission and any thoughts that any of you may have to share about that with respect to this moment of incubation nation I spoke to a gentleman once who was walking on the waterfront in Auckland and he said that work of art there helps me know who I am, helps me know where I am in relation to the world. This is how I know I am a citizen this is my reference point and in a much wider definition of art we've also got built environment and place we've got this beautiful place which has got art interventions through it that help make the place a brand new country well depending on how you look at it and in terms of our built environment we're a brand new country and we're still putting works of art into it and every time one goes in we know more about who we are as a citizen and one of the most powerful things about art of course is that it carries with it some truth and we need truth all the time we need to hear it, we need to feel it I've kind of lost faith with documentary I find you can interview someone, ask them a question and then go away and then record the question so the answer is but I love mockumentary because artists are looking at the human condition and almost like a caricature amplifying who somebody is I don't know if I'm answering your question but I think in New Zealand just like every other nation in the world is using art for all of those things and pretty dedicated to being more and more of it and just to add to that where I see enormous opportunity and where I was really quite excited by your comment is in New Zealand and also other major cities around the world a lot of the art pieces have come from an activism place that reflection in a place of pain and what I really liked about what you said is what are the opportunities coming from a place of healing and looking into the future and what could be so I think that's something just to reflect on I think just in response to the word healing I've discovered art can do that too some of the rap a little there's a guy that of you know life's led them astray they come from families that don't have boundaries this is just a personal observation now okay and mum and dad haven't got boundaries so there's no boundaries set in the house so these young fellas grow up and their issues their high maintenance muscled up little dudes running around causing chaos and so as a consequence they end up coming down to the marae and they have to be part of the crew that does that well what I've found is once he's sweating they seem to intellectually kick in and start asking questions so you know a question that I often have is they ask me questions about their culture and it's through the carvings by the probation officers because instead of mowing lawns you're all in the carving shed with me haven't thought at all about the symbolism of the carvings but for me I can see a lot of movement kicking in when I start talking about the symbolisms that we have you know why there's this tattoo on them or that carving has got a tattoo here and everything like that so it's quite for them I can tell it's quite liberating for them to understand the cultural symbolism that was all around them but no-one's ever told them about one I found was very powerful at the time kicked off the sculptural piece that I've left here with you guys to look after a simple fishhawk and they were in there one of our whakaeroa on the wall was Maui and they said to us that's up there with the three little piggies and that story has potency in itself and the same with the other one called Stranger Danger so when it came to Maui I said the symbolism of the fishhawk because he was holding a big fishhawk is that when you travel over the Pacific ocean that islands and clouds literally rise up out of the circumference of the ocean so that the old people because we didn't have a written language symbolism and metaphors became a huge thing for us to impregnate issues of identity into our people so the idea of a man pulling up a fishhawk and that turning into land is truly a myth it's a myth and a legend that conjures up amazing muscled up heroes and pictures and those images they will remember but really the idea of that a whole metaphor in itself really what we talk about is that Maui travelled over the circumference of Timuana Nuiakiwa and discovered Aotearoa because the land rose up off the horizon then they started getting that because it had real significance the symbolism that they were looking in the meeting house had real hands-on significance for them and there were many more stories like that that I was able to share with them and then the probation came around and I was like right get away there were many other stories like that and that's where I believe art can have a healing nature and some of these boys, one of them has gone to the carving school in Rotorua to learn, other boys have taken up multi-culture in the schools so just as a quiet observer it's really liberating for me to see how art can have an influence on the repakes of our communities I'm not actually sure what my question is but I think coming from the United States of America we have a very young culture and I've done a bit of travelling in the world and New Zealand has a rich culture that goes back pretty far and you guys have a lot of symbolism with design and branding and communication and I think something that we all strive to do with those of us who work in this industry we're always trying to find a symbol that can encapsulate a lot of meaning and there's some relationship between symbolism and storytelling that you find in all ancient cultures of antiquity and Maori art is certainly rich with that same kind of symbolism that you were just describing you're sort of telling this story that's rich with metaphor and all kinds of meanings and then there's meanings to be derived from it based on who you are I guess my question is just how do we develop our own sort of symbolism and storytelling, what are some of the ways that we can learn from that methodology, that sort of way There's a good question I think some of the ways that you could learn would be just to listen to the indigenous voices of different peoples and try to look at them with say just for example the boys I was talking to in the carving shed I had to take their western lenses off and create old school Polynesian lenses for them to see it and then it came alive so perhaps like my apprentice is from Argentina, he's an aji and his symbol is the puma because in Patagonia they have the puma there and the condor and he's starting to look at it now with I forget the name, the indigenous people of that area and it's given him a different insight because when he goes back home he'll be carving but trying to emulate the stories and the symbolism of that particular area I think that's where it's at, it's just using our ears and opening our hearts, it's like what's going on around here these few days that's a big challenge being a pākehā and thinking about say for example use of Māori symbols in a pākehā world well it's not just a pākehā world of course it's a Māori and a pākehā world but as a pākehā so yeah it can be really challenging for example I had a trustee of the arts foundations and he would tell me stories about pākehā moving in a Māori world to help me navigate it and I would need to speak and he said well I am nervous and he said well you cannot be anywhere nervous nervous as a young Māori person so you need to know the language but you're not so that was a helpful thing to learn and then he said the best way forward is to understand all the customs or the ceremony as best you can use some words to acknowledge the space out of respect and then within the context of what I understood about Māori use my own language so be myself in that context it's been a really good bounding stone for me and the other thing is to never say you over there or other or them over there or hey I've got a favour for you because I'm going to use a bit of your culture and bring it into the mainstream those things are just recolonisation again so there needs to be a genuine partnership and the partnership isn't just about the symbols and I know that you know this but it's just about the stories but it's the way of thinking the pace, we have a trustee at the arts foundation called Derek Lardelli he's just amazing man he's my tā moko, we want to take my shoot off and show you my tā moko from Derek Lardelli it's amazing only if Rebecca takes my shoot off I'll hold it you have to tell them what it means beautiful there's a good bit of symbolism strictly native that's native to the area I know what it is so Derek in the board meetings listens to all the talk and then at the end he will speak very quickly in the language and it sounds like music he translates it into English for us but there's a whole different way of thinking so it's the stories, the symbolism but being with the people to get the way of thinking and the pace and the insights it's unbelievably rich it's an important part about living in this country okay this is really inspirational creative great discussion so thank you both very much thank you