Our Stories Makes Us by Ollie Moginie for SCAPE Public Art Season 2018 – Re:ACTIVATE Aspiring Artist Senior

When he created his miniature sculpture Our Stories Make Us in his Visual Arts class, Year 11 student Ollie Moginie had no idea it would become part of SCAPE Public Art Season 2018.

‘My teacher, Mr George, told us about SCAPE and several of us submitted our work to the competition. It was pretty cool to have my design picked up for the exhibition.’

The local environment, particularly our braided rivers, are very important to this artist who created this work to represent its fragility and unique state of balance. Each stick represented an individual part of our environment, and together they formed one beautiful sculpture representing New Zealand. The sculpture was held together by each stick and if we let one of them go, for example letting our rivers become polluted, then the whole sculpture would have fallen apart, and would have just been a flat pile of sticks.

Ollie created his original out of matchsticks. ‘In class we talked about the design process, then I did a few drawings and came up with a few different designs, different ways to put them together, before deciding what I wanted to do. It’s amazing to see my work magnified and recreated on such a grand scale.’

Our Stories Make Us was constructed by Dominion Constructors and Lewis Bradford engineering, with the sticks painted by Ollie and technology teacher Gavin Love.