Sheyne Tuffery is a multi-media visual artist who uses painting, printmaking, sculpture and animation to facilitate his visions of Pacific urbanisation. He has been a practising artist for 10 years, continues to exhibit in the main centres of New Zealand and is regularly involved in overseas exhibitions.

Sheyne brings the past and the future together in his work. As a child he remembers drawing comic book characters. Utilising his imagination, they addressed the cultural nuances that pervaded his life. The flatness of the comic character and the spaces they inhabited offered a means to “harness both the realities and fantasies” of Pacific youth.

Today Sheyne sees himself as a “paper architect”, building futuristic spaces while creating monuments reflective of the past. In particular, Tuffery uses the fale (house) and va’a (canoe) structures in his new world. These icons of the past are redesigned for the future reflecting the shift in technology in the 21st century. Although this may seem at odds with the past, this incorporation of new materials and technologies is something that Pacific peoples have done for the millennium. These objects of shelter and travel offer excellent models for the future as they incorporate the cultural fabric of the past.

The house and the canoe were structures created by men that offered both protection and mobility to a migrating population. Within these structures people learned the cultural knowledge necessary to forge ahead, to innovate, and to dream. These structures afforded the place and space to think about the world that they inhabited.

Tuffery in his latest work is combining his life with that of his ancestors as well as those to come. He is creating a hybrid metropolis ‘an integration of the island and the urban’ as the future for the Pacific. Creating futuristic monuments allows a reference to a cultural heritage, reflects a current reality, and suggests an identity for the 21st century.

edited from a piece written by Karen Stevenson