Mohamed Belkouadssi makes cement tiles.
His is not a name that trips lightly off the Kiwi tongue, which probably explains why the Whanganui artisan, originally from Marrakesh, Morocco, calls himself Moa, and his business, Moabell Design.
He started calling himself Moa long before he came to New Zealand, and, at the time, had not heard of the extinct, flightless bird.
He was living and working in Spain at the time and the Spanish pronunciation of Mohamed was hard on the ear. When he met his New Zealand partner, Catherine Sleyer, she explained the significance of his sobriquet.
Moa lived in Barcelona for about 20 years, after leaving Marrakesh in 1989 to seek a better life. He originally intended to join some student friends in Italy but stopped in Barcelona and stayed, working in construction.
"Barcelona was preparing for the Olympic Games so there was a lot of work there," he says.
His interest in tiles comes from his childhood in Morocco, and in his work in Barcelona he saw a lot of beautiful tile patterns.
"In Barcelona, in the 19th century, there were four or five houses making tiles in competition (with each other). It was the time of art nouveau in Catalonia and there were lots of designers and artists designing tiles for them."
His home in Spain was more than a century old and the patterned tiles were as fresh as new.
While Moa makes some of his own designs, he also uses patterns from catalogues he has collected in his travels.
He makes cement tiles in a process called encaustic or hydraulic. Each tile is made individually in a single mould, one tile at a time, and his patterns are created using zinc stencils he has created himself, by hand, out of necessity. There are hundreds of them, from the simple but effective, to the elaborate and intricate.
