Living Painting
by Puoro Jerome & Marcus Winter
Music fromAotearoa
The story of the atua of Māori music, told through taonga pūoro, live sand art and digital art.
Best with headphones
An ancestral story of Hineraukatauri, the atua (goddess) of Māori music in Aotearoa New Zealand. The work retells pūrākau, Māori stories, through taonga pūoro performance, live sand art (Toi Onepu) and digital art.
Jerome created the song entirely with taonga pūoro, traditional Māori instruments, with no Western musical influence. The gentle rhythm is the heartbeat of his child, still in the womb at the time of recording.
Jerome embodies Pepepe, ira tāne, the male essence, playing for Raukatauri, atua wahine, her cocoon glowing as she listens. Marcus Winter’s sand art, set in the centre of the scene, tells the story with every stroke of the hand.
The work was a true and equal collaboration between all three artists, a chance to practise their roles as Tangata Whenua and Tangata Tiriti, honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
The whakairo (carvings) that frame the painting are 3D scans, made with permission, from Waipapa Marae. The master carver Pākariki Harrison carved Raukatauri in the 1960s as a call to revive a fading art form: “Who will help revive taonga pūoro?” We hope this work plays a small part in answering it.
Opened the Māoriland Film Festival 2024 · Official selection, Native Spirit Film Festival (UK) · Nominee, Third Culture Film Festival
Taonga pūoro
Puoro Jerome plays taonga pūoro, the traditional instruments of Māori music, made from wood, bone, stone and shell and played with breath, voice and body. Once close to being lost, taonga pūoro are being brought back into daily life by a new generation of players, and Jerome is among them.
Sand art (Toi Onepu)
Marcus Winter is a sand artist from Aotearoa New Zealand. In Toi Onepu, live sand art, images are drawn by hand in sand on a lit surface, each one dissolving into the next as the story unfolds.
Typography
Johnson Witehira is a Māori artist and designer whose work brings Māori visual language into contemporary design and typography.
Digital art
Jonathan Hislop is a digital artist based in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the founder of Sounds of a Sphere. Jonathan films traditional musicians and dancers, then sets them inside worlds built from the visual heritage of their own cultures: temple carvings, miniature paintings, illuminated manuscripts.
Each world is built by hand in Unreal Engine, Nuke, After Effects and Photoshop. No generative AI is used at any stage. Musicians and cultural advisors guide how their tradition is represented.
These Living Paintings have filled a room at the BNZ Auckland Diwali Festival three years running, opened the Māoriland Film Festival, screened at international film festivals and been shared by New Zealand embassies around the world.
