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(Photography: Nancy Zhou)
(Photography: Nancy Zhou)

PartnersSeptember 21, 2023

For Nina Oberg Humphries, art is everything

(Photography: Nancy Zhou)
(Photography: Nancy Zhou)

In this instalment of Art Work, multimedia artist Nina Oberg Humphries talks about creating community, and how her art links her to home.

Nina Oberg Humphries is a multimedia artist based in Ōtautahi. Her practice explores the contrast between Cook Islands artefacts, performance, tradition and Western popular culture. She was awarded Canterbury University’s Macmillan Brown Artist in Residence and the Creative New Zealand Mana Moana cohort Scholarship in 2020. She is also the director and co-founder of the Tagata Moana Trust, a non-profit organisation whose mission is to drive STEAM pathways through Pacific arts, language and culture. Her work has been exhibited at the Christchurch Gallery, the Bergman Gallery, Enjoy, and The Physics Room.

What the working week looks like

My working week is extremely varied and has very long hours. I run a charitable trust that does STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) education throughout the South Island for Pacific kids, through Pacific art, language and culture. We also run a hub in Ōtautahi and a Pacific gallery which is the first and only one in the South Island for Pacific artists to show work.

I also have my own arts practice, where I’m a multimedia artist using predominantly Cook Island spiritual items as a place of reference, and now I’m a mother of three children – a five year old, a three year old, and a one year old.

My work week generally is quite chaotic, and compartmentalised. The first thing I do is meet with staff and check in on the projects we have going on and what’s in the week ahead. We could have community groups coming in, have artistic workshops, have an exhibition opening, any of the above plus programmes with schools.

(Photography: Nancy Zhou)

Then I quickly roll into admin: looking at things like finances, accounts receivable, accounts payable, reconciling accounts, and looking at budgets, for the week ahead, for the month ahead – where are we sitting, what’s our projected budget, what have we spent. All of that!

Then I’m looking at what proposals I might need to finish, or researching other ways to bring in money to run the organisation. That’s the first three days of the week. Our last two days of the week are more project-focused, and about delivering things.

Up until recently, it was just me and a part-timer who had been doing all that. We’ve now expanded to five staff – we’re all artists with our own practice, and we’re all cramming into delivering things.

All the admin

Organisation is not my strong suit. I’m more likely to react to what is in front of me, especially with so much going on. I tend to work on a 24 hour timetable, because I have so many various things that I’m doing. 

When it comes to my arts practice and actually making, I could get about two to three hours of work a week to be actually making things. Then the rest is all research and admin. There’s no prescribed thing. It’s chaotic.

It’s trying to live every day and get to the next – making sure that the money is coming in, people are happy, and we’re still able to continue the work.

(Photography: Nancy Zhou)

Finding the energy

The way in which I’ve coped with all of it is that I’ve amalgamated it all together. I founded Tagata Moana Trust out of a need that I saw, and it’s very much an extension of my community arts practice. Then I have my family, and my own making. But it’s all one.

The only way I could cope with it is to have it co-existing with each other, which does become problematic when you’re looking at things like burnout and always having to be on demand, particularly for wider communities. I support a lot of people in writing proposals, in thinking about their arts practices. I’m very concerned with what our Pacific platforms for our creatives look like in Christchurch, but that’s been out of a pure place of me growing up here and really needing to see those platforms, having a lot of talent here but nowhere necessarily to nurture that – and losing everybody to Auckland. 

It’s very difficult to be able to put yourself first, but I think that when you have kids, you relinquish that anyway. So the only way that I’ve been able to continue an artistic practice is to be within the context of this Trust that I’ve created. I’ve created my own artistic job and I’ve been able to be financially okay as a creative person.

(Photography: Nancy Zhou)

Working on my own artistic practice

I spend a lot of time thinking about what I’m going to do when I have a project coming up, whether it’s an exhibition, a commission, or even just a lull in the calendar because my hours are so limited in terms of production. I might get just three hours a week, or I might have a month from now where I have a moment, where I realise that to look after myself this week, I need to have it off to be able to make something.

That process is purely hands-on. I work a lot with new materials and it’s an exploratory time with those materials, or about trying to knock out some work for an exhibition. It almost becomes quite manic, and there’s a lot of pressure involved because there’s such limited time to be able to produce the work and make sure there’s still a high quality of production.

(Photography: Nancy Zhou)

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been making work that is about Cook Island spiritual items – taura atua. The word “taura” can mean many things, but for most Pacific languages, it means “to be anchored” or “to be an anchor”, or a cord. Making these objects is something that I’ve been really interested in because they’re of a pre-colonial time, they speak about spirituality, personal spirituality and multiple gods, which is something that isn’t supported today in the Cook Islands, and those memories are really disappearing. 

So when I make these items, or these taonga, it’s about trying to recreate the same kind of spiritual energy in which they would have been made.

When I’m making, it’s quite meditative. It’s a spiritual practice. It is the way in which I refill my cup and my energy. That taura, or that cord, back into my ancestor or my place, where I’m from, particularly not being born in Christchurch, as a second generation Cook Islander. That time in the studio is incredibly spiritual practice for me.

Other than that, there’s times where I’ve gone in to make stuff and I can only think of it as going into a dark hole – I go in there and make and then when I reach a switch in energy, I’m coming out and I’ve produced this piece. It’s a religious and spiritual practice for me, that is formed in these objects.

What would make it easier

The biggest shift would be if people actually valued the arts. Without art, we do not have creativity. Without creativity, we do not have innovation. Without innovation, we do not have solutions. Without solutions, we, as a society, as a world, as a universe, will cease to exist. 

So when art and being creative is put on the social ladder as being something that you can’t make money from or is airy-fairy, that devalues it. Artists comment, we capture our changing world, our changing environment. We leave the world open for there to be able to be change and innovation so the world, and our societies, can continue.

(Photography: Nancy Zhou)

Art is life, life is art. We don’t have a word in Pacific languages that actually translates to the word “art” because everything is so intrinsically part of being creative and connecting to your spirituality inside, so then we can be more connected as people to our environment, and to each other.

I’d like to see every single person value the arts as the centre of everything, because it is our well-being. It is our health. And it is our future. As long as we deny that, we continue to not reap the benefits of what our futures could look like, and how prosperous it could be to everybody.

What structural changes would help?

I think we [in the South Island] need more support, because I don’t think we’ve been afforded the opportunity to envision in the same way. Our audiences haven’t been as developed, our programming isn’t as developed, our institutions aren’t as developed.

There’s obviously a huge gap and that will predominantly be funding related. We need more support, but at the same time, we do need to find ways in which we sustain ourselves without having to be under anybody, or reliant on anybody.

What makes it all worth it

We’ve got an exhibition soon, and I know I’m going to be stressed the whole time – until we get to about 9pm on Friday when everybody’s been kicked out the door, and it’ll feel like a blur. But I’ll remember the little conversations I have with people, or the kid who comes in and gets to experience some of their culture for the first time.

It’s the projects coming to fruition – to be able to look at them and go, “Oh yeah, that’s good!” – and celebrating those projects. You’ve got to do your admin, but when you get to the end of that, it’s about the project. It’s about the thing you’ve created or done, it’s about the smiles on people’s faces.

– As told to Sam Brooks

(Photography: Nancy Zhou)

Keep going!
Youth strikers gather in  London to protest against the government’s lack of action on the climate crisis (Photo: Getty Images)
Youth strikers gather in London to protest against the government’s lack of action on the climate crisis (Photo: Getty Images)

PartnersSeptember 18, 2023

The challenge of communicating effectively on climate change

Youth strikers gather in  London to protest against the government’s lack of action on the climate crisis (Photo: Getty Images)
Youth strikers gather in London to protest against the government’s lack of action on the climate crisis (Photo: Getty Images)

It’s one of – if not the most pressing issue facing humanity today, so why can it still be so hard to get people to pay attention to climate change?

Climate change and the fight to stop it is discussed every day, but another related issue is nearly as knotty and barely rates: that of how to talk about it in a way which induces the desired response. 

Nikki Wright runs Wright Communications and has worked with clients like Toyota and Urgent Couriers in the sustainability space for almost 20 years. David Robertson runs Hardwired, a consultancy which deploys behavioural psychology to nudge consumers toward the desired behaviour. 

Together they told Duncan Greive on the latest episode of The Fold how to bring your audience with you when you’re talking about big, gnarly issues like climate change.


Listen to The Fold, a podcast series brought to you by The Spinoff and oOh!media. Conversations about the intersections of media, culture and technology in New Zealand, hosted by Duncan Greive.


Duncan Greive: Nikki, I wonder if you could start by telling me about the founding impetus for Wright Communications?

Nikki Wright: There were two major things really. In May 2006 I watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, and I have to say that it really lit a fire inside me. It was so confronting. At the time I was working in corporate communications, and really in highly regulated industries, oil, pharmaceuticals. These companies have amazing management systems. And I was focusing on corporate social responsibility for them, but I was thinking it’d be amazing to do the same kind of work, but for companies that were more inclined to be doing the right thing in general. 

It was about December that year, I had basically decided I’m going to set up my own agency. I bought four computers and a Cisco phone system, and upskilled myself on FSC certification and got some business cards printed with vege inks and rented some space in downtown Auckland, and Wright Communications was born. We were set up to serve companies that were really engaged in sustainability, and needing help communicating that mission.

Nikki Wright (Image: Supplied)

DG: This still feels like an evolving conversation, but also what you’re describing happened almost 20 years ago now. When you took the proposition to people, what was the reaction?

NW: There was a growing membership of organisations joining the Sustainable Business Network, and what is now the Sustainable Business Council. We could see there were a number of companies, but there weren’t many specialising in the PR side of things. 

There were entrepreneurial companies doing the mahi; Ecostore, Urgent Couriers were carbon neutral, but they didn’t have a dedicated comms agency helping tell those sustainable stories. The likes of Toyota, they were our first major company, and they have been loyal to us ever since. And over the last 17 years, you know, we’ve really challenged each other.

DG: David, you founded Hardwired, which is a consultancy focused on behavioural psychology, which, in the context of New Zealand, is a relatively specialised discipline. Tell me about where that came from, and how you interact with your clients?

David Robertson: Not a dissimilar story to Nikki really. What drove me to found Hardwired is, I was seeing businesses and their customers, customers and businesses, and this yawning chasm emerging, where neither were connecting to one another. 

I think that there was basically a general lose/lose. The customers were not getting the relationship nor the value that they wanted from a business and certainly businesses were not connecting to customers and that, if anything, has just increased as economic pressures increase.

What I was seeing was business being dehumanised. I had been working for some time with the psychology of people, whether that was at a cultural level, a customer level or a business level, and the emotional hardwiring of those people. As human beings we’re hardwired to do what we do, whether we choose to do it or not, like fight or flight. 

What we were seeing was that if we could humanise the relationship between customers and businesses, some remarkable things could and would occur. We’re very new to applying it to businesses, not many people are using behavioural economics at a business level. 

David Robertson (Image: Supplied)

DG: There’s a frequent reference to this idea of an “emotional connection” that a client or a customer might make to a business, which people can be cynical about. But is there an example of a client that you’ve worked with, where the insights that you’ve delivered or the research that you’ve uncovered has had an actual tangible impact on the way they conduct themselves and how they articulate that?

DR: That’s our world with all of our clients. If we were not achieving that, I think we’re not really getting where we need to be. The thing we’re talking about here is a paradigm shift. 

When it’s done authentically and done well, we have a term we call it “we together,” which is where our business and its customers feel that they’re in this together. And that “together” means that the role as a customer is supporting a societal or community value: the business benefits and the customers benefit.

DG: Do you sense that the political-economic focus on cost of living, which has sometimes explicitly said, “we’re just gonna have to take a break from progress on those other goals” has dented an overall interest in people and businesses talking about sustainability? How would you counter that from a broad, emotional behavioural science or communication perspective?

DR: I think if you take the approach that sustainability initiatives are done to people, or are done separately, like they’re a little sidebar or separate initiative, and therefore they can be turned off or on, then inevitably, they will be turned off or on, depending upon the economic climate.

I think that’s indicative of the issue that we have with anything cause-related – it becomes voluntary, or perhaps only necessary when there’s money. And I think that’s the singular problem with thinking about sustainability or any cause-related issue this way. 

If it’s done with people, and people are doing sustainability, we’re doing this together, then I think no matter what happens, no matter what the political or economic climate, it’s done together. That’s when communities in society say “no, this is so important. We can’t turn this off, we have to do this together.”

NW: Individually, I think there’s people out there, most of New Zealand, who are really, really struggling with the cost of living. And so you go into that scarcity mindset, of “how can I save?”, and sometimes you do drop the thing that could have an environmental benefit, because there was a price premium attached to that. So I think that is true, that is happening. 

However, at a corporate level, there is more momentum than ever. We see this in the Climate Leaders Coalition, we see this with compliance through the Task Force for Climate Related Financial Disclosures, and the soon to be released Nature-Related Disclosures. So there’s, there’s a momentum building at that corporate level.

But wait there's more!