About this Event
Elam Te Waka Tūhura is delighted to host Reuben Paterson for a Making Spaces lecture in Lecture Theatre 440, Arts and Education Building, on Wednesday 6 May 2026 at 6.00 pm.
Making Spaces provides a platform for leading artists and arts professionals to share insights into their practice and ways of working. It creates space for their voices, exploring what they make, and why and how they make it.
Reuben Paterson (b. 1973, Auckland, New Zealand: Ngāti Rangitihi, Ngāi Tūhoe, Tūhourangi, Scottish) uses the transformative properties of light to reach beyond appearances and pry open the complex histories and tensions that sit just beneath the surface of all things. His art is made in celebration of exchange and encounter, hybridity and fluidity, spirituality and sexuality, and is especially attuned to the dynamics of queer identity and whakapapa-based modes of cultural knowledge.
Patterson will discuss how his practice has evolved from the major recent work, Guide Kaiārahi (2021), and his experiences of relocating his base outside Aotearoa. Made from hundreds of shimmering crystals, Guide Kaiārahi is a ten-metre-high waka rising vertically from the pool in Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tāmaki's forecourt, inspired by the legend of a phantom waka that appeared at Lake Tarawera ten days before the eruption of Mt Tarawera in 1886.
*All are welcome to attend; registration is required.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
University of Auckland, B201-440 (Building 201, Level 4, Room 40), 10 Symonds Street, Auckland, New Zealand
NZD 0.00
