Collection: Kereama Taepa

Kereama Taepa is a multi-disciplinary artist of Te Arawa and Te Ati Awa Māori and European New Zealand heritage. His practice spans fashion, painting, sculpture and digital technologies. Consistent across this exploration of media is an investigation of the traditions of innovation within te ao Māori (the Māori world).

His art often employs Virtual Reality and 3D printing to imagine objects and entities that exist in other worldly realms. His works often reflect the carved style of Māori art from Taranaki and Te Arawa, such as the iconic serpentine style of Te Ati Awa. The figurative forms are not bound by physics or gravity, but speak of a space where spiritual beings might be experienced through digital media. 

Kereama received a Masters of Māori Visual Arts from Toioho ki Āpiti, Massey University in Palmerston North in 2006 and currently lives in Tauranga Moana where he teaches on the Bachelor of Creative Technologies at Toi Ohomai Institute of Technology, Rotorua.

Taepa has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally, with work in major public and private collections in Aotearoa New Zealand and abroad. Taepa has been recognised in several art awards, winning the Supreme Award at the Molly Morpeth 2D Awards in 2008 and receiving the Rotorua Museum Supreme Art Award in 2017. In 2016 he was awarded the major public sculpture commission for the Four Plinths Project on the Wellington Waterfront where he created A (Very) Brief History of New Zealand. In 2018, Taepa was the Artist in Residence at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Alberta, Canada, and in 2019 exhibited work at Urban Shaman Gallery in Winnipeg as part of the InDIGInous Aotearoa: Virtual Histories, Augmented Futures exhibition. Continuing in Canada, in 2022 he exhibited a major installation in Nuit Blanche in Toronto.