Jessie Wong

So I think it goes back one step, right?

Like, how do you make Wellington a place that people want to live, raise their families, build businesses?

You know, how do you make it just a fun, beautiful, exciting, vibrant place to be?

And that probably is a combination of several things that allows, you know, creativity to thrive.

So there's probably, you know, those links for students who are coming out of their degrees.

I remember, you know, when I finished my degree, there was

you know, not heaps of resource and no super clear ways to get into the industry.

It was all like a little bit figure it out.

And so being able to, you know, put some of those frameworks in place, more investment and capital infrastructure around creative industries.

But I think in order for that to come, we have to have an event or a cultural anchor or something that really exemplifies

um design and the excellence and not excellence in the sense of being best excellence in the sense of you know we are a very collegial city we don't you know often speak about how um how we you know punch on the world stage but we we really do people like Sabine Marcellus studied here we have people like our friend Seb Hunt from Entire Studios building an incredible brand over in LA

which has absolutely gone global.

You know, lots of people don't know that these people are from Wellington and I think we need to really show the kind of value that that creativity can have in the economy and the ecosystem that we live in and build that infrastructure for the next generations to come up and for it to thrive here.

What's coming up?

We had an ambition to build a flagship event for Wellington, which is attended and anticipated and something that is not only just for the public and for the city, but also for the industry to get around and work together on and actually build some of those relationships.

and so the long-term vision is to do something that will you know really position wellington as the creative capital of the pacific and have other cities coming in in a wellington biennial which will exhibit a breadth of designers and pavilions and disciplines so architecture furniture fashion jewelry ceramics you know anything anything that is crafted and designed i think is a really

important thing to showcase but in order to get there you kind of have to start somewhere and so this year what we're doing is a pilot event called Common Material the nucleus of which was very much in the fashion industry because you know that's who I know in design and got involved and so we are

going to be at the City Gallery for three days starting this Friday.

Charlotte Davey, who's the new director there, definitely kind of she's got on board with the vision and got the gallery ready-ish for this event.

We'll be taking over the ground floor.