Natone Park School student Richie Whiti, 12, puts the finishing touches to one of the mosaics the students helped create.
Mosaics and murals of stream and river life are helping school students around Porirua’s Bothamley Park become its guardians.
Last year students from schools neighbouring the park in Porirua East; Russell School, Corinna School, Brandon Intermediate School, Natone Park School, Porirua East School and Rangikura School, took part in art camps, organised by Pātaka Education.
The camps were inspired by work educators at Pātaka had done with the Mountains to Sea, an organisation running freshwater education programmes, studying the health of stream life around the region.
Inspired by the murals, drawings and sketches the students produced at the camps, Porirua artist Kerry Scott had been working with children from Natone Park School to produce a series of mosaics and murals of the creatures found in and around the stream running through the park.
Pātaka Educator Linda Fordyce said the camps had given the school students the chance to start to build a relationship with the park they had never previously had.
“Establishing the outdoor art camps allowed the children to both examine the amount and health of life in the park’s stream, and produce art that reflected the stream life they found.
“The children were able to see how much rubbish was in the park, some of them were horrified to see the rubbish being dumped down here, there was a whole motorbike in the stream at one point, it was quite interesting to see the anger they felt about that.
“Those feelings came through in the art they produced and so the project helped connect the students with the space, while also fostering kaitiakitanga (guardianship) for the park environment.
Fordyce said that Kerry Scott had been the on-site artist at the art camps, and because of her background working with mosaics, was the ideal person to help the Natone Park project.
Scott said she had loved being able to make art inspired by the students.
"I used the kids sketches and research about the fish and the bugs that live in the streams, I took their ideas, and turned them into mosaics to go into the park.
“I find when you take on people’s ideas, and their viewpoints, that can be more empowering to the person than saying, ‘make these using this design’.
“Even though they are not making the mosaics it’s their ideas that have been taken on board.
“This way of working connects people back to the project, now the students are the kaitiaki of the stream, and their mosaics almost become little guardians themselves.”
1 Jul 2019
