Big and deep and huge

Lisa Reihana's In Pursuit of Venus took six years to make.

Lisa Reihana started In Pursuit of Venus, the video shortlisted for the Signature Art Prize, during the global financial crisis, when 7500 ships were anchored around Singapore waiting for world trade to start again.

"Everyone was imploding and I thought, 'I don't want to live like this, I want to do something significant, I want it to be the best it can be, I want it to be big and deep and huge'. I didn't want to feel the world was going to stop me," Reihana says.

That it took six years to produce comes down to the effort needed to earn the $300,000 it has so far cost - video is an expensive medium - as well as doing the thinking and research needed to realise a complex piece.

"I spent a year deciding on the pixel ratio. Once you set the pixels that's the structure and you can't go back, because that's the scale of the quality of the work," she says.

In Pursuit of Venus could comfortably be projected up to 4m high without losing detail. It was inspired by seeing the wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique at the Australian National Gallery, a panoramic wallpaper first shown in Macon, France, in 1806.

Entrepreneur Joseph Dufour wanted to capitalise on public interest in the voyages of Captain Cook, and asked his friend Jean-Gabriel Charvet for the design, which probably owed more to the years Charvet spent in the Caribbean than to any Pacific flora.

Reihana remade the background digitally and replaced the figures by filming live performers in front of a green screen and mixing the results.

"It's hard to make something about the Pacific without it being exotic, because of the costumes, the sound, the performance, so I was thinking about how to make an artwork and not just peg it to a Pasifika notion. The haka [in the Aotearoa section of the work] is really important because you see the performers from behind, so it is putting the viewer in the role of tangata whenua," she says.

As well as the Signature entry, Reihana was one of this year's five arts laureates chosen by the New Zealand Arts Foundation. That recognised three decades of ambitious activity that has required her to constantly break ground not only in the way her work was made but how it was presented. She attributes some of her approach to her time with the Maori film and video collective Te Manu Aute in the 1980s.

"There were all the discussions from that politicised broadcasting time and that is the stuff in my head: 'Who are you representing? What are you trying to say? Where are you moving it? What is your philosophy around how you work?' So this is a filmmaker making art, rather than the one-liners.

"I see art work around and I think, 'I had that idea 15 years ago and didn't do it'. Because I wanted something more meaty. I want more, I'm a bit greedy, I want substance, I want a whole lot of stuff to chew on.

"I think if you put a lot of energy, research, thinking into something, it will have a really long life, because there is more and more for people to discover."