Nicole Cherize Welthagen

Te Umu Wairua | The Hearth of the Spirit

The texture of memory…

Te Umu Wairua is an immersive installation gallery proposed for Broadway, Newmarket, a space where architecture becomes narrative, and material becomes breath. It explores how light, texture, and form can hold wairua, inviting visitors not just to view the work, but to inhabit it.

An angled façade of anamorphic concrete panels offers two readings: from one side, the etched image of Karaiti crowned with thorns emerges; from the other, narrow slats reveal the linen drapes within. This duality reflects taha wairua and taha kikokiko, the spiritual and the physical woven together.

Inside, eight monumental linen drapes span two levels, engraved with layered hatching lines that cast shifting shadows as light moves across them. These surfaces do more than divide space, they raranga memory, time, and presence through the gallery.

Hospitality is central to the installation. Manaakitanga is expressed through a brass plate joined into two stones, reimagining communion as an act of welcome, generosity, and grounding.

The project evolved from rhythmic hatching sketches that revealed bodily rhythms, ngā auora o te tinana. These marks informed material experiments across linen, cedar, stone, leather, and brass, each carrying its own mauri and contributing to a tactile conversation between the earthly and the sacred.

Te Umu Wairua becomes a wāhi noho wairua: a place where story, ritual, and installation converge. It asks whether design can hold memory and generosity, shadow and light, and offer a threshold where architecture becomes encounter, presence, and spiritual home.