PRINT SEASON: February 2011

A duo show with Rosemarie Nightingale, in St Paul St's Gallery III, Auckland New Zealand...
& my first show after my Masters exhibition.

Home Away from Home heralds a moment of the 'connective synthesis' that underlies the methodology of my practice. I can't recall how the two elements came to mind, but it was at seperate moments; the timing of a deadline being the final weld. The green canvas tarpaulin was the floor to my grandparents' caravan awning decades ago, travelling the length and breadth of the countryside. And since used for many other purposes - painting drop-sheet, trailer cover, and for the last few years living in the back of Dad's jet boat, serving as the picnic mat on the stony beaches of Lake Wanaka.
The lonely trees have been transplanted from the back blocks of the West Coast of Auckland, my second home. The stamp of the colonial landscape is dominant, and the shifty nature of being descended (so recently) from colonial movers and shakers is brought to the fore.

This work is an example of the unusual demands I put on the high-tech (only one in the SOuthern Hemisphere) digital fabric printing machine at the Textile & Design Lab at AUT University, Auckland, NZ. http://www.tdl.aut.ac.nz/

The flat bed is definitely not the 3.2m x 2m size of the tarp, so it was printed in 3 parts and (almost) immaculately lined up with digital precision, proudly leaving it very hard to spot the joins. The close up image shows the original stamp on the tarpaulin, and names its point of origin, my home town, Dunedin.

Two video works, Never Ending Sunset I (Otago Hinterland) and Never Ending Sunset II (West Coast AK), serve to aid contemplation of where it is that I am and have come from. Because 'if you don't know where you're from, you won't know where you're going', (which might be a hip hop quote?). The videos are edited to first run forward for approximately a quarter of an hour, then are seamlessly joined to the same shot playing backwards, which is then looped for an endless experience of blissful dusk.

Rosemarie's work sat beautifully alongside mine. The map is of Mt Ruapehu and the National Park. The casting 'prints' of rocks are made of rocks from with the park, but of course aren't allowed to be removed.

The Trouble With Being A Proud Pakeha

My art practice is motivated by a realisation that I have been deeply naïve about the cultural realities of my country.  Moving from the South Island to the North Island was the first step towards understanding what it means to ‘be’ and ‘become’ Pakeha, and what this can mean in a global post-colonial context. Parallel to ongoing cultural research, I visually document North and South to allow motifs and signifiers to come to the foreground; Objects materialize from this process, operating as ‘souvenirs’ to moments of discovery. Essentially, my art practice applies a ‘soft activist’ approach to the colonial condition of overwriting history. These images are from my Master of Art & Design (Visual Arts) exhibition held at St Paul St Gallery, Auckland, in November 2010.

Souvenirs To Moments Of Discovery From 2009

The Russell Lupins of The South Island display a magnificent array of crayonbox colours in the summertime. Covering fields and riverbeds and lining the edges of the highways of the Central South Island, they create a heady sense of scenic wonder that belies their true nature of epidemic weed status, (as they negatively impacts on the habitat of threatened braided riverbed birds). In 2009 I explored these opposing sentiments with an 'illegal' street art project 'beautifying' Grey Lynn, Auckland City. Essentially the ongoing work is an analogy for the post-colonial realisations I've had after looking a little harder at the physical and cultural landscapes of Aotearoa New Zealand.