How would you describe what you do?
I help catalyse impact by assisting people achieve their dreams through helping them get legal structures right. Also help amplify stories to encourage others through seeds podcast (www.theseeds.nz) which has 270+ episodes.
What was your most recent project?
Explaining “Why Stories Matter” for the SDG Aotearoa Summit held online – 10 minutes and 10 visual slides and my story to draw from to do it.
What project have you worked on that you’re the most proud of?
A project to creatively imagine what the future legal structure for social enterprises might be in New Zealand and then co-authoring this report: https://www.theimpactinitiative.org.nz/publications/structuring-for-impact
What is essential for creatives to have in their life?
The right attitude to believe in yourself, and time and space carved out for the practise of creativity.
What inspires you about Ōtautahi?
The hills, the ocean, the clouds, the sunsets.
What piece of advice about your creative work has served you well?
I love this quote by Annie Dillard:
“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now… Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.”
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
What’s the biggest misconception about your creative work?
That it is not possible to be a “creative” and also have a traditional title like a lawyer, accountant or similar. It’s OK to let creativity infuse all aspects of what you do.
What Christchurch artists do you most admire?
In the past the writers of the Caxton Press like the poet Allen Curnow – I have nearly every book he has written and some are signed. I like to think about artists of the past and this quote really resonates with me when we think of the past and what we might create here today – but this time with integration across business and other sectors as well:
For two decades in Christchurch, New Zealand, a cast of extraordinary men and women remade the arts. Variously between 1933 and 1953, Christchurch was the home of Angus and Bensemann and McCahon, Curnow and Glover and Baxter, the Group, the Caxton Press and the Little Theatre, Landfall and Tomorrow, Ngaio Marsh and Douglas Lilburn. It was a city in which painters lived with writers, writers promoted musicians, in which the arts and artists from different forms were deeply intertwined.
Peter Simpson in Bloomsbury South, The Arts in Christchurch 1933-1953 https://aucklanduniversitypress.co.nz/bloomsbury-south/
What artwork/piece of music/performance has taken your breath away?
Pulitzer prize winning ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’ by Annie Dillard greatly influenced me.
What do you wish you’d have known about creative work when you were younger?
That it shouldn’t be separate from other work. All work is creative.
What’s your favourite hidden secret in Ōtautahi?
I love walking through the native trees and plants at Riccarton Bush and imagining what it was like here long ago.