Reinventing a New Zealand icon

Abstract

An international art icon search our lanscape and you will come across one familiar building, whose conceptual forms were birthed in the years following the great travail of the intertribal wars, and who physical structures converged the belief systems of two vastly different races. This structure is really our only distinctive, international art icon - the Maori meeting house. The meeting house is not only a New Zealand icon that can shout aloud our identity as a nation to the world. It is also an invitation to us as flesh-and-blood human beings to gather together as creative communities and to tell our own stories in the art works upon its walls.