Carin Wilson
New Zealand sculptor and furniture maker
Carin John Wilson (born 2 March 1945) is a New Zealand studio furniture maker, sculptor and design educator. He was a leader in the country's craft movement in the 1970s, 80s and 90s and was one of the inaugurators of the design showcase Artiture in 1987. He is a descendant of the Ngāti Awa ancestor Te Rangihouhiri and the founding chairman of Ngā Aho, a design initiative that advocates for collaborative and creative practices among professionals within the Māori tribal structure and community. The Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design conferred Wilson with an Honorary Diploma in Art and Design; in 2002 he received an inaugural Toi Iho mark, a registered Māori trademark of authenticity. His design practice, Studio Pasifika, has been in operation since 1993. Wilson is included in Helen Schamroth's 100 New Zealand Craft Artists, Douglas Lloyd Jenkins' At Home: A Century of New Zealand Design, and Michael Smythe's New Zealand by Design: a History of New Zealand Product Design.
Background
Wilson's ancestry embraces both of New Zealand's founding cultures, Māori and European. His maternal grandparents were Italian, and his paternal grandfather, a Scot named Andrew Wilson, married Anahera Kingi. He was born and raised in the South Island and enrolled at Victoria University of Wellington in 1963 to study law. Soon bored with his legal studies, he found employment as a sales representative for a Māori publishing company, during which he trained in organisation and methods.
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This entry incorporates text from “Carin Wilson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.