George Nuku is an artist with a deep sensitivity to connections between all human life, nature and environment. Born in New Zealand and of Maori, Scottish and German descent, he creates extraordinary environments which connect strongly to his native culture and history. Arriving in Britain in 2006, his work was transformed from more or less traditional to contemporary, when he created from Plexiglass a full scale version of a traditional Maori sacred meeting place, a Marae, to exhibit in Pasifika Styles. Co-curated by fellow Maori artist Rosanna Raymond, this was the first exhibition to bring contemporary artists into the anthropological museum in Cambridge.

A truly contemporary voice from ancestral stories

Many large scale, carved, and often either pure white or translucent architectural and sculptural installations followed. George Nuku’s work became increasingly recognised as carrying a truly contemporary voice, addressing connections between Maori ritual with wide environmental and cultural concerns. He has created installations in many of the world’s great museums, which evoke great ancestral stories, address issues of ownership and belonging, and make future cultural connections and relationships possible. Specific references, both in terms of the spaces he creates and his performances may come from Maori ritual, creation stories, the pantheon of spirits and ancestors, and his personal journey.

Oceans Collections Reflections

The grandest of George Nuku’s installations to date was Oceans, Collections, Reflections at the Weltmuseum Vienna in 2024. This occupied 9 rooms of the museum. Tackling the past, present and future of the vast range of the Pacific, George Nuku created spectacular displays interweaving artefacts from the museum’s Maori collections with his own paintings and sculptures. Its themes tackled exploration and colonialism, ancestry, nature. The exhibition included a Bottled Ocean element and was created with a large cohort of volunteer makers and performers (see video below).

Plastic is our ancestor

As a maker, George Nuku is rooted in a material world, which is imbued for him and by him with spiritual power. Use of the material plastic, is an example of the connections George Nuku makes between matter and spirit, ancient and contemporary culture. Though he also uses bone, shell and stone, plastic is one of his favourite art materials.

Polystyrene, through its lightness and ease for carving gives him the versatility and potential for large scale work (above). Plexiglass offers him its translucence and transparency. As Karen Jacob has quoted: Nuku states that he speaks the language of plastic fluently: ‘Our ancestors carved out of wood, because they lived in a world of wood. We don’t live in a world of wood, we live in a world of plastic, even parts of our body are made of plastic now. Plastic is the currency we use in exchange rituals. So, I think it is more divine than wood’

(Jacobs, 2009 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21500894.2022.2070659#, 117; 

In fact George will go further and state that plastic ought to be revered as one of our ancestors. It is ancient material formed from oil, laid down in the earth’s crust over millennia. It is everywhere, including within us, inescapable. And it has the capability to be beautiful .

Bottled Ocean

George Nuku first created Bottled Ocean as part of an invitation from the Kaohsiung Museum, and other centres in Taiwan. Always named 100 years after the year of installation he imagines a world which has become sea-level flooded. While its original inspiration was the Kevin Reynolds film Waterworld, with its mutant hero, Nuku created quite different scenarios.

As the original hosts stated:
“Bottled-Ocean ….used the oceanic wastes that had drifted all around the globe as a medium to juxtapose the ancient Austronesian symbols and contemporary universal experiences, creating a modern fable and prophecy. In a ritualistic and artificial scene deep under the sea, the marine life and temple made of plastic wastes depicted an uninhabitable world human single-handedly created in the future….”

For George Nuku, Bottled Ocean is for sure a statement about climate change. But it is also about venerating a material which had ben vilified. Plastic is valued rather than being despised and trashed. But the work is only partly about plastic, it is more fully about transformation. Full of sea creatures fashioned from plastic bottles and flooded with light and rich colour, the Bottled Ocean series celebrates the life of the seas which connect us. The ocean has been fundamental to the creation of Maori way of life, originally bringing ancestors to the land over the waters. Traditional carving styles and images at the root of Nuku’s own work are steeped in the curves and turbulence of the waters.

Bottled Ocean has been in great demand globally, at museums and festivals from Belgium to France, Taiwan, Aotearoa New Zealand, Indonesia, New Caledonia and The Netherlands. Nuku has always co-created the works with hundreds of contributors. For example he involved 250 people in Vienna (as the film below describes) , and more than 400 in Edinburgh in 2024.

He trains the volunteers to help to make sea creatures from plastic bottles. Not only that but they become convinced by the whole argument in favour of plastic as a precious material which should not be wasted. People of all ages from 5 to 90 become steeped in his bigger cultural story, drawn to his personal magnetism and influenced by his spirit of generosity. Inevitably the numbers of loyal advocates and followers are ever growing in Nuku’s world.

Performance

George Nuku’s range as an artist includes being a charismatic performer and an extraordinary storyteller. He is highly spiritual, believing in the life-force which connects his creativity with the deep history of Maori culture. More than that, this sensibility extends to embrace a much wider world. He speaks of his work as ‘the art of’, itself a force which can convey ideas beyond what we can readily see. It goes deeper to a connection with all living things.

Currently George Nuku lives in France but continues to exhibit and conduct many workshops and activities globally. George Nuku is an internationalist, an artist who aims to speak for a better world.