An exhibition by Caselberg Trust artist-in-residence Becky Cameron opened this week. Cameron talks to Bruce Munro about homemade pigments, Harbour Cone and exploring a sense of place.
Becky Cameron has brought home some roadkill. A freshly dead possum.
She covers it in ink made from the charcoal remains of local wilding willow and presses the furry body on to a large sheet of paper.
She holds up the sheet to inspect the result, and smiles.
It is a curious way to make yourself at home.
But that is what Cameron (45) has been doing during the past three months at Caselberg Cottage, on Otago Peninsula.
Since April, the Caselberg Creative Connections 2016 Resident has been roaming iconic Hereweka (Harbour Cone) seeking inspiration as well as the materials with which to translate those ideas into works of art.
"It's me exploring the area and trying to understand its ecology and find out what different people think will be its future. And then trying to reflect my learning in what I've been creating,'' Cameron says.
She is standing outside the harbour-edge cottage on a crisp winter morning, eyes and mouth smiling, hair backlit by sunlight penetrating overhanging branches creating leafy frames for a vista of cloudless blue sky, hazy islands and sparkling harbour waters.
In one hand, Cameron holds a possum-fur paintbrush.
In the other, a pot of yellow paint made from local earth.
"I've been trying to source all the materials for the artwork out here at Harbour Cone,'' she explains.
That has involved making the pigments, charcoal and inks, some of the paper and all the paintbrushes she has needed.
"Yellowhead Peninsula, here where the cottage is, has beautiful yellowy ochre pigments in the cliff.''
She has also found some red and white earth, as well as a piece of a blue-ish earth.
"I've been grinding them up with a pestle and mortar and adding some watercolour binder, some gum Arabic, and making nice-coloured paints. So, it's a bit of an odd colour spectrum. I've got a lot of orange and red shades and white.''
Local clays have also been used to fashion pinch pots and for art sessions with pupils at Broad Bay School.
The charcoal and black ink has been made by burning unwanted willow.
The bark of broom and thistledown were pulped, pressed and dried to produce some paper.
And then there is the use of roadkill.
Like the possum she found while out with members of the environmental group Save The Otago Peninsula, planting trees on the lower reaches of Hereweka.
"He must have been hit not long before I came along because he looked like he was just asleep on the side of the road.
"I was drawing pictures of him. But then I also rubbed some of the ink pigments on to him and printed him on to paper.
"I just laid him on a piece of paper and gently patted him down. Initially, I put too much ink on and it was just a bit of a smudge. But when I did it again with less ink, it actually made quite a nice imprint. It looks nice and possumy. You can even see his whiskers and ears on one of them. And the tail prints beautifully.''
A sheep skeleton received similar treatment.
Some of the possum and sheep prints have been incorporated into a few of Cameron's landscape drawings.
"Because they are part of what is shaping the landscape at the moment.
"Harbour Cone is very scenic, but I don't just want scenic views of Harbour Cone. I want drawings that are more about what's going on, the various conflicting forces.''
Possum fur, rabbit fur and the fibrous ends of cabbage tree leaves have all been used as paintbrush bristles.
Cameron is an artist and art conservator.
Trained in the United Kingdom and at the Dunedin School of Art, she has lived in New Zealand for 14 years and Dunedin for six.
She will shortly complete a three-month residency with the Caselberg Trust, which supports writers and composers as well as visual and performing artists.
The focus of Cameron's project has been nearby Hereweka.
It has served as a temporary locus of her enduring interest in ideas about landscape, belonging and home.
Well-travelled, and living thousands of kilometres from where she grew up, she uses her art to explore and make herself at home in new places, "whilst at the same time 'unpicking' the source of my response to these places''.
To do that, she has walked the hills and gullies of the publicly owned Hereweka block, talked to locals and delved into the oft-photographed mountain's history.
"Part of why I think I like Otago Peninsula is that it reminds me of England, with the sheep and the dry-stone walls.
"But then I've been realising that of course that wasn't the natural landscape of England either. It used to be all forested as well.
"It's changed how I think about where I came from.''
Cameron's work is also a reflection on how people interact with their environment.
"The possums are an interesting case in point. They're a significant pest species, but they're also beautiful animals.
"So we've created an ethical dilemma for ourselves by altering the balance of the ecosystem in ways we didn't understand or think about when possums were introduced.''
Exhibition
To mark the end of her residency, Becky Cameron is staging an exhibition, "The Hereweka Project'', at Bellamys Gallery, in Macandrew Bay.
The exhibition begins with a public opening at 3pm tomorrow.
At 4pm, a short film by Tracy Jones will be screened, documenting the artistic process Cameron employed during the project.
"The Hereweka Project'' runs until July 3.
