NZ Visual Diary - entry 292

Ruamoko

[Artists: Ralph Hotere and Mary McFarlane]

The spectre of a cataclysmic earthquake, on the scale of a Magnitude 8 event, dominants ominously the backdrop of daily life in New Zealand. Neither island is insulated from the tragedy that would befall it in the wake of such a significant geological event.

The Alpine Fault is an 800km fault line that stretches along the western edge of the South Island. It has produced twenty-six Magntitude 8 earthquakes in the past 8,000 years.

Its North Island counterpart is called the North Island Fault System, a collection of 8 major and numerous secondary fault lines that to this day haunt Wellington, New Zealand’s capital city, as well as the Hawkes Bay Region to the north along the eastern coastline.

In 1998 the artists Ralph Hotere and Mary McFarlane installed a collection set of sculptures entitled ‘Ruamoko’ on the sidewalk of Lambton Quay in Wellington, a major thoroughfare in the heart of the capital’s central business district. The set of 4 columns are arranged as a mix of upright and toppled structures as one might imagine would be the scene in the aftermath of a Magnitude 8 earthquake. In Māori cosmology Ruamoko is, among other notable attributes, the God of Earthquakes.

More broadly, the Lambton Quay thoroughfare is the epicentre of Wellington’s public sculpture walk.