Last night Kirti and I had the opportunity to go to the opening of the Maori Market exhibition. We had literally just launched the new website for The Pencil Gallery who are one of the exhibitors, and so Matt got us both tickets. They opened the exhibition with speeches from parlimentry ministers and some songs, which were really quite amazing. The majority of the people there were Maori and so everyone who knew the words joined in too, it was beautiful.

The art is breathtaking - a huge range of style and pieces - some stuff very traditional like carving and weaving, and then other stuff that is very contemporary. I have always had a liking for weaving and so some of my favourite stuff was the woven kite bags and in particular Alexine's woven bodice and skirts. She has woven beads in too, they are spectacular!

Something that always strikes me with artwork is when you see a piece in a book, magazine or in this case on a website - no matter how high quality the image is - there is nothing that compares with seeing the artwork for real. The amount of detail and texture in these pieces really blew me away, I think especially because I had already been working with photos of the artwork for the last couple of weeks.