Tui Hobson wins 2025 Pasifika Aniva Arts Residency

Tāmaki Makaurau artist Tui Hobson is the fourth recipient of the Aniva Arts Residency, a partnership between Pātaka Art+Museum and Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa. The three month, paid residency is offered to a Pacific artist or practitioner who identifies as LGBTQIA+/MVPFAFF. Tui will work with the Pātaka curatorial and exhibitions teams to realise her project, Wairaka Pou, a contemporary pou honouring wāhine toa.

“We are looking forward to welcoming Tui to the Pātaka team and supporting her with Wairaka Pou,” says Jacki Leota-Mua, Māori & Pacific Curator at Pātaka. “Tui was one the first wahine carvers in Aotearoa and is a trailblazer in supporting other women to pick up the chisel”.

The 2025 Aniva Arts Residency will culminate in Tui’s pou being installed in the spine at Pātaka. Tui will also present an artist talk to share her knowledge and experience of the project.

"The Aniva Residency aligns with the Pacific Arts Strategy 2023–2028, which prioritises ensuring Pacific arts include our whole village," says Kawika Aipa, Creative NZ's Manager Pacific Arts, Enterprise.

Tui says the pou will be a tribute to the inspirational women in our lives and our shared history. Wairaka Pou will honour the memory of Wairaka, a revered ancestral figure who travelled from Ma’uke, the most easterly of the Cook Islands, to Aotearoa and saved women and children on board a drifting waka. For women at that time, touching a paddle was considered tapu, but Wairaka seized the paddle and called to her ancestors, “Kia Whakatane au I ahau!” meaning “Let me act like a man!”.

“My pou will represent Wairaka as a stylised and androgynous figure and will stand almost three-metres-high,” says Tui, “The elements carved into her mantle will signify and connect her Pasifika roots, her migration and the whenua/wairua of Aotearoa.”

Tui says she has strong connections to Wellington and to Pātaka. As a young artist, she drew inspiration from her visits to the gallery: “Pātaka was a place that gave me confidence that a career as an artist was possible.”

Tui Hobson’s sculpture career has spanned three decades and draws on her Cook Island heritage. She’s produced over 75 solo and group shows, symposiums, private commissions and large public works, working in recycled native woods, stone, cast glass and, most recently, bronze. Tui’s work ranges from small-scale pieces to large outdoor sculptures with themes of migration and navigation increasingly becoming part of her work.

Tui has undertaken commissions in Aotearoa and internationally, including carved seats for the Le Quesnoy commemorative gardens in Northern France and, most recently, a carved pou for the gardens of a Tāmaki Makaurau rehabilitation centre.

Tui will begin work on Wairaka Pou later in the month.

DEFINITIONS: MVPFAFF (Pacific LGBTQiA+)

M for Mahu in Tahiti and Hawai'i.

V for Vaka sa lewa lewa in Fiji.

P for Palopa in Papua New Guinea.

F for Fa'afafine in Samoa and American Samoa.

A for Akava'ine in the Cook Islands.

F for Fakaleiti or leiti in the Kingdom of Tonga.

F for Fakafifine in Niue.