Tāne Mahuta

I began this project in 2019 as part of my Artist Residency at AUT. The initial focus was on scanning Tāne Mahuta, but the pandemic allowed the scope to expand to other New Zealand trees.

Tāne Mahuta, god of the forest, is sacred to Māori. It was an honour to be given permission by Te Roroa iwi to ascend Tāne in the name of raising awareness of this magnificent tree, whose life is threatened by kauri dieback.

With freedom to travel within New Zealand through 2020 I was able to collect lidar and photogrammetric data for further trees, including Taketakerau, a two-thousand-year-old Pūriri in Ōpōtiki, and Ratanui, a fifteen-hundred-year-old northern Rātā near Whanganui. The work led to a radical new way of creating photorealistic point clouds using drone technology, and to the possibility of a digital repository of significant trees worldwide.