I can’t say this was one of my favourite giraffes, but at least the venue was nice: Mona Vale, an intercity garden park with lots of beautiful lawns and herbaceous borders. Wandering down its pathways and happening across a giraffe beneath a row of trees did make for a nice afternoon.
Called Kea Parrot Stay, it was designed by Alejandra Diaz, a Costa Rican painter who grew up around parrots and as such was inspired to decorate this giraffe with New Zealand’s most famous example of the species: the kea. According to my guidebook, the kea’s skill at solving puzzles and their ability to work together are traits also to be found in Cantabrians, which… is a bit of a thematic stretch, but okay.
A mint-green giraffe with stencil-like pastel images of keas and a few white ferns didn’t make this the most memorable sculpture on display, but as it happens, it’s now been over a decade since the 2011 Christchurch earthquake that claimed 185 lives. This entire art exhibition was brought about in the wake of the disaster as a way of injecting colour and creativity into the city as the rebuild went on, and I’m reminded of the experience of travelling around the city in search of these giraffes: a chance to talk with other seekers, to see places in the city I’d never visited before, to see Christchurch gradually coming back to life… maybe there is something in Cantabrians being compared to keas.
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