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 is a trailblazer in supporting other women to pick up the chisel”.

Kawika Aipa, Manager Pacific Arts Enterprise at Creative New Zealand, says the calibre of applicants this year was high and highlights the incredible number of talented Pasifika artists in Aotearoa, “Growing and building strategic partnerships and collaborations is one of our priorities to deliver the Pacific Arts Strategy 2023 – 2028. We want to thank our partners Pātaka Art+Museum and Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre who have been fantastic to work with and everyone involved,” Kawika says.

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.

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 and the Pātaka team have expressed gratitude to Porirua City Council Parks Manager, Lydia Mihaka, for facilitating the supply of local macrocarpa for Tui to use in her work.