KEY POINTS:
When Michel Tuffery went to Berlin last month, he didn't spend much time in the city's museums and art galleries.
Instead, he used gifts of CDs from Wellington bands like Fat Freddy's Drop to hook up with kids in the graffiti scene, who gave him a guided tour
of their side of the city.
"We went from one train station to the other, looking at the graf art," says Tuffery. "I wanted to see what direction they were taking it in, looking at their mark-making, the way they try to change their style, their approach with spray cans or markers.
"Whenever I go to another country, I look for tagging and graffiti. It's a language in itself."
Tuffery makes graffiti stencils, which get added to some of Wellington's walls and also underlie his Ngaro/Blowfly series at the Lane Gallery.
"The flies are something I have been doing on the side for a few years. There was a big graf wall in Wellington at Waitangi Park. I used to go down there and do big stencils.
"It's another way to muck in and play with other artists. You don't graf straight over other artists, you add on or tweak to make them better or try to merge your senses with others."
Stencil art and graffiti have been part of the fine art landscape for a generation now; the starting point for artists like the late Keith Haring in New York and British undercover artist Banksy.
"I use him as an example with the kids. You can be like a dog marking a wall, or you can be like Banksy and be intelligent with your mark-making."
The idea of graffiti and overlaid marks bleeds into the other series on show - bronze casts of the head of James Cook, an extension of Tuffery's First Contact series, which depict the explorer with moko, a hibiscus behind his ear, a fish or a bird whispering to him.
"I dive a lot and one thing I do know is when we go free diving, it is like listening to the water, so if you want to swim in a school of fish, you have to be relaxed," Tuffery says.
"Birds are the same. When I go to the bird sanctuary, I see that people have forgotten how to move silently through the bush.
"When Cook was here, it must have been amazing seeing the country in its clearest condition."
As Tuffery is of Cook Island heritage, "Cookie" was always going to loom large in his work.
He says even now, going to places like the Tahitian islands where Cook moored, "I can feel the presence of Cook and his crew".
There are also the visions of the cast of characters along for the ride - the artist Sydney Parkinson, scientists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, Tahitian priests Tupaea and Mai, and the crew whose lives and bodies were forever marked by the voyages.
Tuffery's art never stays still, as he tries out new materials and techniques. It's a way to avoid the stylistic traps and the rut some of his peers seem to fall into, especially as they struggle to make modernism out of traditional Pacific Island themes and motifs.
"I have been looking at film recently. Any artwork I make, I'm shooting film so I can animate it. It all goes on the hard drive."
The performance aspects also force him to look at his work another way - a technique he brings into his teaching. "I ran workshops where I got the kids to make a sculpture, graf it, then burn it, filming all the time.
"Then I got them to make woodcuts based on the experience, so they were not copying from books, they were making their own marks.
"Teachers are being lazy. They are not teaching kids how to make their own work for themselves."
