Big Pāua – Riverton

The pāua shell at Riverton/Aparima is about four metres high and lined with roughly a thousand sheets of real pāua – which is the detail that separates it from almost every other Big Thing in either country.

Most oversized objects are fibreglass painted to resemble the thing they depict. This one is clad in the actual material. Pāua is the New Zealand abalone, and its shell interior is a dense, shifting blue-green iridescence that no paint reproduces convincingly; using real shell means the sculpture does what the animal does, changing colour completely depending on where the light and the viewer are. It is a much harder object to photograph than its size suggests, and a much better one to stand in front of.