Te Rautini Sheridan
E rere kau mai te awa nui
Mai te kahui maunga ki Tangaroa
“Ko au te awa ko te awa ko au”
Ko Ruapehu te maunga
Ko Te Awa Tipua te awa
Ko Patiarero te marae
Ko Whiri-Taunoka te wharepuni
Ko Morikaunui te wharekai
Ko Ngāti Hau te hapū
Ko te Atihaunui-a-Paparangi te iwi
Ko Aotea te waka
Ko Turi te tangata
Artist Statement
Art is a vessel that allows us to transport our past into the now to carry us forward into the
morrow. It is the artist’s duty to preserve this history for future generations and this is why Te Rautini chose to pursue art as a fulltime pursuit in 2008. He had always been creative since his early years and carried this into his teaching career until deciding to study art and creativity through the Learning Connexion and whakairo through Te Wānanga o Aotearoa. This gave him exposure to a range of disciplines with sculpture, clay hand-building and printmaking being his main areas of interest. In sculpture he was also driven to learn glass casting after a dream gave him a solution to viewing his classical whakairo forms utilising natural light creating translucent transformations.
This also led Te Rautini to collaborate with other artists to produce a number of innovative sculptural works. The most notable of these is a collection of glass taonga puoro or Māori traditional wind instruments and a series of glass castings onto ceramic masks, something he had been wanting to explore since his glass journey began some 13 years previous. Many of the sculptural forms that Te Rautini creates use found or upcycled materials as a response to the waste from the building industry or the general population. This is also his way of informing us of the impacts of the global crisis on the environment, and ultimately humanity.
