Sara Hughes - Iwi Rau / Many Leaves, One Canopy
475 glass panels that wrap around the New Zealand International Convention Centre.
About the artwork:
Since the early 2000s, Sara Hughes has forged an artistic language that pulses with geometric precision, vibrant colour, and a masterful sense of composition. Her practice flows effortlessly across scales—from intimate canvases to immersive installations and monumental public artworks - always marrying conceptual rigour with a profound sensitivity to light, rhythm, and spatial experience. Hughes’ work often reflects on time, light, and the cyclical patterns of the natural world, layering colour and form to evoke movement, energy, and the quiet dynamics of living systems. It is this sensibility that made her uniquely equipped to realise Iwi Rau, where shifting light, layered transparencies, and architectural scale converge to transform the New Zealand International Convention Centre into a forested experience.
Hughes’ public art is celebrated for turning abstract ideas into experiences that are at once visual, spatial, and deeply felt. Iwi Rau marks the pinnacle of this trajectory: one of the largest integrated public artworks in New Zealand, a seamless fusion of architecture, light, and glass that conjures the presence of Aotearoa’s forests at the very heart of Tāmaki Makaurau.
Aotearoa’s forests exist at the edge of deep time, formed in the ancient world of Gondwana and carrying over eighty million years of uninterrupted lineage. Today, they continue to rise in towering canopies, while roots and fungi thread unseen mycorrhizal networks through the soil, quietly sustaining life above. Iwi Rau channels this intelligence and generosity, bringing the rhythm, texture, and subtlety of the bush into the urban environment. Its name unites human and plant life into a single metaphor: iwi as people, rau as leaves—the many elements that form a canopy—reminding us that, like forests, communities thrive through collective strength.
Executed in ceramic frit across 198 nine-metre glass fins and 277 large flat panels on the building’s north and south façades, Iwi Rau wraps the Convention Centre like a korowai, a cloak of colour, texture, and movement. Hughes reconstructs the forest canopy with the sensibility of a painter, layering colour and transparency to capture the shifting light and subtle rhythms of Aotearoa’s bush. Viewed from different angles—inside, outside, up close, or from afar—the work cannot be seen all at once, encouraging visitors to move through the space and discover new details with each glance. At night, integrated lighting animates the forms, creating a polyphonic tapestry where architecture and forest converge, holding its own presence, movement, and quiet vitality.
Sara Hughes has brought the forest into the city. Iwi Rau rises as a living taonga, experienced both from within and from afar—a canopy of light and memory that transforms the convention centre into a place of wonder, connection, and reflection. Here, the city meets the forest, and every visitor is invited to stand beneath its shade and feel at home.
