Nautilus, Ōwhiro Bay's creative community, says goodbye to artists after 15 years

Saturday, 24 June 2023

After a messy sale, artists have been moved on from one of Wellington’s last affordable creative spaces. But at what cost? André Chumko reports.

Devastated, shocked, frustrated. These are some of the words artist Mary Laine has used to describe the roller-coaster of emotion she has been through over the past year.

Laine and a group of other artists have called Nautilus – a converted workshop at Wellington’s Ōwhiro Bay – home for the last 15 years.

But as of the end of last month, the group has been forced to disband, with the building Nautilus occupied sold and the artists having to move out – despite what they claim was an earlier agreement to let them temporarily stay on by the new buyer.

While that person, Addam Buttling, declined to comment to The Post, the current owner of the building – Mike Gall – confirmed the sale still has not been finalised, weeks after the initial settlement date lapsed.

“[He’s been] mucking me around,” Gall says.

The building – at 3 Happy Valley Rd, by the sea – was internally converted into fit-for-purpose artist spaces by its creative residents over the past 15 years. Colour, paint, sculpture, even a rock climbing wall, donned the inside.

But the artists’ footprint is gone now.

Named after the mollusc found on the nearby coast, Nautilus also sported a large-scale mural by Taupuru Ariki Whakataka Brightwell, daughter of master carver Matahi Whakataka Brightwell.

Ahead of the building’s sale, Brightwell invited The Post to the site to walk through the mural’s meaning, fearing its future in new hands.

“To be so casual, and dismissing it … there’s so much history here. It’s naive. That’s what upsets us all the most. That doesn't give you the right to displace this. I just don’t understand,” she said.

At the end of May this year, a carving at the top of the mural belonging to Brightwell’s whānau was removed from the building to return to the family.

That was her “moment to let go” of the artists’ use of Nautilus, and the mural itself, which she painstakingly worked on over the course of a year, mostly alone.

“It symbolises the passing … of the mauri this space held – its spirit. This carving holds the spirit of the place. It symbolises moving on.”

Being a publicly-funded mural via Creative NZ money, the case has called into question what happens to a painted mural on privately-owned property when the latter is sold.

As the mural – Te Taenga o Kupe, or The Arrival of Kupe – faces the roadside, many in the Ōwhiro Bay community and wider south coast of Wellington have an attachment to it. It’s become part of the community itself, Brightwell says.

The artist group that called Nautilus home unsuccessfully tried to get heritage protection for the mural, with Wellington City Council spokesperson Victoria Barton-Chapple saying it did not meet the criteria in the district plan.

Heritage NZ and the council both say the building itself has never been formally proposed for a heritage listing in their separate registers. Despite that, Kerryn Pollock, a historian and heritage adviser, says: “I feel for the Nautilus collective members.”

Creative NZ also says its hands are tied.

“While we don’t have control of a building owned privately, we recognise how much work the artist has put into the mural, and that it’s made a valuable contribution to the environment it sits within,” said Amanda Hereaka, the Creative NZ staffer who used to co-manage the Toi Tipu Toi Rea programme the mural received funding from.

For Brightwell, who plans to move back to Gisborne to help out her Cyclone Gabrielle-affected whānau, the mural being lost is “too much to think about”.

“I’ll deal with it when the day comes.”

‘Brutal’ eviction

Last year retiree Mike Gall began looking for buyers for 3 Happy Valley Rd – an earthquake-prone building – wanting to move on from the space.

Initially, the 20-odd artists who used the property pleaded for prospective philanthropists to come forward, saying the strengthening work was manageable. They hoped for a buyer who would allow the artists to stay on, in a similar agreement to one they had with Gall.

They feared the property – one of the last independently-run, affordable artist spaces in Wellington – would be lost to a developer.

After an unsuccessful search, Gall put the property on the market.

Despite fielding other expressions of interest, the property was sold to Buttling, an Auckland-based director of the Addams Trust Company Ltd.

According to the NZ Herald, Buttling previously took seven months to pay a deposit on a property he’d purchased on the Hibiscus Coast Highway in Waiwera, north of Auckland, before asking for a “price adjustment” on the sale price, claiming work was needed.

Buttling did not complete the sale or make rental payments over a six-month period, the publication reported in 2017.

With the Nautilus building, Laine alleges Buttling indicated to the artists that he did not want them to stay on-site permanently, but was initially willing to give them “wiggle room”, adding it was understood Buttling wanted to use the space as his workshop eventually.

While a settlement date of late May was agreed on, Buttling “led us to believe we could stay” in part of the building temporarily, Laine alleges – time the trust planned to use to continue searching for a new space.

But instead, Laine says the artists feel like they’ve been used as scapegoats. As settlement neared, she says they were told they would have to vacate.

In the space of days, the artists dismantled and removed all of their possessions from inside the building, including from a broad open-plan area, various other spaces used by artists, and a gallery – something Brightwell called a “very chaotic”, “frantic … survival” process.

Laine says they did end up getting out in time, but it felt “pretty brutal”. “We didn’t have much of a chance to say goodbye. Everything we built over 15 years is gone now. Everything. It feels a little bit like all that for nothing. I laugh, but it’s a sad, sad laugh.”

But settlement was not reached on that date. Gall extended to June, but settlement was not reached then, either. A new settlement date has been set for mid-July, Gall confirmed this week.

Gall says he expected the artists would be able to stay at Nautilus temporarily once the property changed hands. “I assumed they were staying there and the guy was keeping them in.”

But he is now considering the possibility the property will once again have to go on the market.

“I’ve been retired for 22 years now … The biggest thing that worries me is the outgoings are now quite a lot, but I’ve got nothing coming in.”

Gall says he may not have accepted the offer if he knew settlement would be this complex. “It’s an awful long time.”

When asked to comment, Buttling said: “Sorry mate, I don’t know what you want from me. At the end of the day I’m not really at liberty to talk about anything.”

He then handed to call to someone he purported to be his solicitor. “Sorry, Addam’s not comfortable talking about any plans for the building at this stage,” the woman said.

The line was cut when more questions were asked.

Buttling was repeatedly texted, and asked for comment on his plans for the building, why settlement was extended, his response to the artists’ saying they were led to believe they could have stayed on temporarily, whether he gave any consideration to Brightwell’s mural or its significance when he made a purchase offer, and what his response to Gall’s claims was.

But no response was received by deadline.

Gall says he would take the artists back on a short-term lease, should the sale collapse, if that was an option for them. “I can’t afford to have it empty … I have too many medical problems.”

Nautilus’ artists had “done very well” and it was “a shame” they had left the property.

But Laine says after the ordeal, the trust would never go back. “We’re the ones that came out the losers … It is a little bit disheartening.”

While now disbanded, the trust is still looking for a new home in the wider Wellington region.

‘A lot of grief’

“This is my livelihood,” Laine, the chairperson of the trust, says, lamenting the storage expenses and other lost wages from not having a dedicated studio space to make art in.

“We’re not a clubhouse. This is providing space for people to make a living. We do community engagement, work with the [local] school – we’re not just a bunch of knucklehead artists screwing around.

“It’s such hardship on us as an organisation … All these people will be on the dole, I guess.”

A decision was made to keep the trust going for three to six months before reassessing whether it would be shut down entirely.

“We’re desperately looking for a new home, but it feels like we’ve tried everything – knocking on doors, empty buildings.”

Wellington City Council previously said it was unlikely to purchase the building, but officials discussed other support the council could provide. Laine says the trust hasn’t heard from the council in months.

The trust’s mission statement says it will provide affordable working space to artists and it’s unable to do that with current market rates, she says.

“It feels like we’re coming to the end of our journey. We have exhausted everything.There is a lot of grief … It’s not just a building, it’s a community with a legacy of hundreds of artists that have come through the space.

“Miracles happen … you never know.”

Te Taenga o Kupe

Painted in the wind and rain and through a long, cold winter, Brightwell’s mural is the only trace left at Nautilus now that the artists ever stayed there.

The Arrival of Kupe is the largest and only monument of its stature on Wellington’s south coast depicting Kupe, and the Māori legacy of sea voyaging and navigation.

Kupe is known as the earliest Polynesian voyager to have discovered Aotearoa from the ancestral homelands of Hawaiki in 900 AD. He and his people planted the initial seeds of Māori and te ao Māori.

Brightwell’s motivation for speaking is to get out the story of the mural as “its days [are] now numbered”. It was a gift her family gave to the Ōwhiro Bay community.

Māori legend says Kupe faced the great wheke/octopus in what’s now known as Queen Charlotte and Tory Sounds after chasing it into Cook Strait. The mural is a commemoration of his arrival to​ the area and the objective to slay Te Wheke o Muturangi.

It follows the shape of a marae, and featured Tangaroa, the atua/God of the sea and art, in the now-removed carving – a fitting deity.

The wood of the carving is a tōtara hull fragment from the waka Hawaiki Nui that Brightwell’s father, Matahi, sailed in 1985.

The right side of the mural features Te Wheke o Muturangi itself, the great octopus; Hawaiki, the sacred homeland of Māori where Kupe and his people embarked from; a coral reef; Te Moana-nui-ā-Kiwa, representing the meeting of the two oceans of Aotearoa; birds, crucial ocean navigation tools; and Kupe’s waka Matahourua.

In the middle, the mural depicts Kupe, his wife Kuramārōtini/Hine-te-Aparangi and his high priest/ritual expert Pekahourangi.

The left side features Kupe’s three daughters, who he named the islands of Wellington Harbour after; a textual version of Māori by Matahi Brightwell; the old Māori settlement site Te Rimurapa (Sinclair Head); a pair of marakihau (sea taniwha); pounamu/green stone that Kupe took back to Hawaiki to prove the discovery of the new lands; and Pari Whero/Red Rocks.

In its top left, Ngake and Poutini, the taniwha of Wellington and the South Island respectively; a meteor/matakokiri; and Aotearoa itself are depicted.

It took Brightwell nearly a year to paint the mural by hand in 2020. She says she wants to share its story so it is not lost to history.

“It’s hard to take this in,” Brightwell says, looking up towards the mural on an evening before the carving has been taken down.

“The nature of a mural is not to be a permanent fixture. That’s what all muralists understand. But this one isn’t just a mural. It’s a gateway to our history, our world. Over 1000 years of history … that’s what I feel like I’m losing – my ancestors, their stories.”