WORLD LOVES REUBEN PATERSON - Listen To Your Kuia T-Shirt - Black
In a new collaboration, long-time WORLD Family Member, Reuben Paterson (b. 1973, Auckland, New Zealand: Ngāti Rangitihi, Ngāi Tūhoe, Tūhourangi, Scottish) wants you to...
'Listen to your Kuia' ...a collection guided by an inner compass.
Drawing from Reuben's screenprint 'GPS' (2011), this glitter design reimagines the pūhoro pattern as a new kind of navigational system. The pūhoro, traditionally found on waka, heke and the body, traces the wake of movement like the way water remembers the paddle. At its centre sits a star, shimmering in glitter like the skies.
This star links the waka to the whare, to the body, and to Te Kapēhu Whetū, the Māori star compass, where knowledge and direction are held in the heavens. In this collection, the glittered constellation becomes a modern navigation tool, a reminder that true direction does not come from magnets or machines, but from whakapapa and home becomes a place we long for, return to, or carry within us.
This collection speaks to that inner home, the one shaped by memory, belonging and the teachings passed down to us. To Listen to your Kuia is to tune your compass to wisdom, to the gentle directives that guide us back to ourselves, back to our people, back to where we stand in the world.
This capsule invites wearers to honour those voices, to navigate through the glittering maps of the past, and to return home, wherever and whatever home might be.
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Universal Sizing:
(XS) Extra Small - Body Width 45.5cm / Length 63.5cm
(S) Small - Body Width 48cm / Length 64.5cm
(M) Medium - Body Width 50.5cm / 65.5cm
(L) Large - Body Width 56.5cm / 78.5cm
(XL) Xtra Large - Body Width 61cm / 82cm
(XXL) Double Extra Large - Body Width 64cm / 83.5cm
This WORLD collaborative T-Shirt was made in Bangladesh with the highest degree of transparency and engagement. 100% Cotton. Designed and printed in New Zealand.
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The world-bending art of Reuben Paterson reaches back to his childhood experiences of the glistening waters and sparkling black sands of Tamaki Makarau's West Coast. His signature use of glitter carries all these memories and the people, presences, and histories to which they connect. Always pushing what he describes as the 'limitless' material and conceptual possibilities of glitter, Paterson's paintings, sculptures, animations, and installations share an optical energy that harnesses the mesmerising effects of pattern, colour, and texture.
Paterson uses the transformative properties of light to reach beyond appearances and pry open the complex histories and tensions that sit just beneath the surface of all things. His art is made in celebration of exchange and encounter, hybridity and fluidity, spirituality and sexuality, and is especially attuned to the dynamics of queer identity and whakapapa (genealogy)-based modes of cultural knowledge.
Paterson is best known for his dynamic glitter and diamond dust artworks that incorporate formal painting properties of sharp line and ornate detail with specially commissioned glitter colours to elicit curiosity and joy. Drawing from his Māori and Scottish ancestry, Paterson combines traditional design with non-traditional media, reinvigorating and extending Māori expression. His recent internationally acclaimed public sculpture Guide Kaiārahi (2022) is a 10-meter-tall crystal waka that rises vertically from Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki’s forecourt pool. The work casts a spell-binding display of refracted light across the building’s facade.