Greg Piper: Nature's Voice

With Conservation Week falling between 14 and 22 September, several of the new exhibitions at Northart this month deal with issues of conservation, preservation and regeneration. In the first of these, ‘Nature’s Voice’, sculptor Greg Piper highlights the beauty and fragility of our environment. Living close to Kauri Glen in Northcote he’s seen areas of the reserve closed to the public due to Kauri dieback.

His naturalistic depictions in bronze of piwakawaka and pekapeka suggest they are the guardian spirits (kaitiaki) of our mammals and birds. “Maori tradition has these creatures as diurnal and nocturnal messengers operating between seen and unseen worlds. The fantails and bats appear as harbingers, heralding calamity over the environmental space that really belongs to them. These native creature spirits bring a timeless past of knowing with them, and also suggest the sovereignty of nature by their golden crowns.”

Greg will be talking about his work and the project that has seen him experimenting by combining found items like seed pods and other dried flora from the bush floor into sculptural forms.