This week we profile Darcy Nicholas of Te Atiawa, Ngati Ruanui and Tauranga Moana iwi. He is Director of Pataka Museum in Porirua, which welcomed 650,000 visitors through its doors last year. Darcy is also a painter, sculptor and mask maker - selling one quietly to Mick Jagger recently. Darcy grew up in the small Taranaki town of Waitara the second to youngest of 12 children.

Photo credit: Tanya NiwaThis week we profile Darcy Nicholas of Te Atiawa, Ngati Ruanui and Tauranga Moana iwi. He is Director of Pataka Museum in Porirua, which welcomed 650,000 visitors through its doors last year. Darcy is also a painter, sculptor and mask maker - selling one quietly to Mick Jagger recently. Darcy grew up in the small Taranaki town of Waitara the second to youngest of 12 children.

Photo credit: Tanya NiwaWhat is the best moment of the day?
The most special moment is touching base with someone I like.

What is your earliest memory of taonga?
I was brought up being totally surrounded by taonga, from pictures of my ancestors, to waiata, my ancestral mountain, cousins, family, and the bone and pounamu treasures in my family.

What's the most memorable Whakatauki (proverb) to you?
In English, one given to me by an Indian from India who welcomed me into his house because I have helped his son: "Nothing good in life comes easily."

What place is with you wherever you go?
My ancestral mountain, Taranaki.

People describe you as a raconteur? What makes a great storyteller?
That comment was just one of my staff having his moment of fun - I have never otherwise been described as that. However, great storytellers can paint pictures with words.

What are you afraid of regarding the future?
With urbanisation and globalisation, future generations will lack the substance of history and culture and become an uncaring and superficial world society. That is already happening.

Where do you get your news from?
Everywhere - from newspapers, magazines, radio, internet, television, travel extensively and from word of mouth.

Who inspired you recently?
Little children inspire every day when I see their enthusiasm and will to go on living and be loved.

You get 650,000 people through your doors at Pataka Museum every year. What's special about Pataka to you?
It is focused on the community and includes what all modern museums, art galleries and libraries should have. It is focused on the concepts of the whare waananga. People, garden, food, knowledge base, experiential, and all the human senses as well as being a place to meet and feel welcome.

What do you most want to achieve at Pataka?
That it will play a major part in the intellectual, cultural, and economic growth of its peoples and the city.

What is still in your art practice that always has been?
Love of the land and its people.

What has changed the most?
Deeper understanding and experience of the world has enabled me to universalise the content.

What project has given you the most satisfaction?
I presume you mean at Pataka, so 'Toi Maori - Eternal Threads' would have to be the single project, following close behind that is the project direction and development of the Pataka Museum.

What's your vision for Aotearoa in 2020?
That we become a loving, caring, and intellectual race of New Zealanders.

What do you admire most in a friend?
To be loving, caring, and always striving to reach their own potential.

What do you admire most in your mother?
She was very loving, caring, and intellectual (had not actually thought about that until I came to this question).

What is the most recent book you have read?
The Biography of Roderick Deane, I think the man and his wife are absolute treasures of the land.

What time do you get up in the morning?
Between 5am and 6.30am.

You are given a piece of string, a stick and some fabric. What do you make?
Probably leave it on the table and drop it in the rubbish bin on Monday.

What's great about today?
Just seeing the great work staff are doing. I mean that sincerely, the other great thing about today is tomorrow (Saturday) I see my granddaughter Ruby again.

Interview by Jacquie Clarke