Rainbow Bridge – Pāuatahanui

It was found in 2020 lying in the workshop yards of a heritage engineering operation, and recovered. The Morgans installed it as a major element of their private art park at Pāuatahanui, where it now stands well out of its original context – a piece of functional infrastructure, more than a century old, repurposed as colour and form.

That repurposing raises the question these objects always raise. A bow-string truss is a genuinely beautiful engineering solution, its shape determined entirely by the forces it carries, and painting one in rainbow stripes both draws attention to that geometry and rather cheerfully refuses to treat it as sacred. Whether that is preservation or decoration is a fair argument, and the alternative was a scrapyard.

It sits alongside Morpheus and Balloon on a Rope in the same collection at the head of the Pāuatahanui Inlet, north of Wellington.

The park is private and operates guided visits by arrangement, so this record is marked access-restricted.