Rebecca Fox talks to the artists about their work.
Is it a park or is it a gallery?
There are trees and park benches to enjoy the view around them but all is not as it seems. Look closer and you realise the trees are made of carbonised karaka and pine, the vine of hand-dyed calico cord and the stars of sequined fabric stretched around central poles.
The view is in fact a moving image of tītī making their nightly return flight from feeding at sea to their alpine burrows in Kaikoura.
Together the elements are the work of Conor Clarke (Waitaha, Ngāti Māmoe, Ngāi Tahu - Ngāti Kurī), Eleanor Cooper and Kate Te Ao, who have been brought together by Dunedin’s Blue Oyster Gallery and Christchurch’s Physics Room to exhibit "A fire that blackened the rocks" at Te Atamira in Queenstown.
"Eleanor Cooper and Kate Te Ao were two artists who we both wanted to work with and were interested in what might be shared between their practices. Their work offered some ideas around unknowable or difficult-to-translate information, knowledge and histories - how these are held in a place or within people and language," Blue Oyster director Simon Palenski says.
"We realised that these questions around ways of knowing are also important to Conor Clarke’s practice, whose work includes photography and modes of writing, and there seemed a resonance between the three artists."
"Kate’s works are these beautiful kind of hybrid tree-like forms, and there’s something a bit comic about presenting some trees and benches together, like, are we in a gallery or are we in a park?"
Her concept for the work came from learning about Queenstown’s past, reading books such as Traditional Lifeways of the Southern Māori by James Herries Beattie, and scientific studies of fossil flora and fauna, then realising how it had long been a meeting point for Māori.
"Before being invited to make something for this exhibition I knew very little about this place, so I wanted to make a work that gathered some of the stories I was learning."
Having studied art and philosophy at Elam in Auckland, Cooper, who also works part-time at Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga as a conservation adviser, found sculpture to be the most natural medium for her.
"It uses the materials of everyday life - it’s in the thick of things."
She jumps between different materials and methods depending on the project. For this one she chose to use plywood to make the benches, slotting the pieces together without any screws or glue, requiring her to learn some precise woodworking skills.
"I spent a lot of time learning to sharpen a chisel on a whetstone, although unlike the YouTube masters I still can’t get it sharp enough to take the hairs off my arm. I also learned to use a router and am thankful I still have all of my fingers."
The next step was to carve the benches with traces of tales about the Queenstown area. The motifs are painted and the indentations filled with resin.
Sonograms are a form of notation for sounds and are often used to identify what birds are present in an area by conservationists. The sonograms were made using an audio editing software called Reaper.
"I like that they’re a silent representation of sound, so that the benches are quiet but in a sense they’re also a noisy tangle of voices."
The benches are also an invitation to visitors to sit and perhaps chat with each other, maybe to share some stories of their own.
"The benches are meant to be used, so I hope people will feel comfortable sitting on them. I wanted to offer something hospitable and accommodating to the space."
Surrounding Cooper’s benches will be components of Te Ao’s work Before, originally shown in 2022, but reconfigured in response to Cooper and Clarke’s works and the space at Te Atamira.
"Elements might be added or removed. I hope it will say some of the same things, about navigation, hybridity, destruction and regeneration. I also hope that new meanings will emerge when it sits alongside Eleanor and Conor’s work in Tahuna/Queenstown," Te Ao said.
The components are made up of trees made of carbonised karaka and painted, machined rounds of pine. The karaka came from a tree she trimmed in her backyard.
"I loved the shape of the branches. I used machined pine to contrast with the natural forms of the karaka. The pine is painted a glossy black and the karaka has been carbonised to create a soft, almost velvety finish."
"I have three children so I’m always trying to make work they’re drawn to. I dyed the rope bubble gum pink because I wanted it to look vaguely umbilical but not grotesque."
Creating the work required learning basic woodworking skills and how to carbonise timber, often relying on trial and error and YouTube tutorials.
Sculpture and installation work appeals because it allows Te Ao, who is also a teacher aide at Te Kura o Whetūkairangi/Worser Bay School, to continuously explore new mediums and ways of making work.
Clarke’s moving image work Night Writing is also unexpected. Normally working in photography, Christchurch-based Clarke has used moving image to capture the lives of the endangered Kaikōura tītī.
She discovered the plight of the tītī through a posting on a supermarket noticeboard about the Hutton’s Shearwater Charitable Trust, a conservation organisation aiming to restore the population.
Interested in Ngāi Tahu and Ngāti Kurī’s historic relationship with the Kaikōura mountains, she found the birds fascinating as they are the only seabirds known to breed above the treeline, high up in the seaward Kaikōura ranges.
"It’s out of character with other birds of their kind, a mystery. But because they’re known to be such an ancient bird species, and because Kaikōura’s mountains are some of the youngest and fastest growing in the world, it’s possible that they came up with the mountains, that as the mountains grew, they lifted the tītī up with them, over the course of millions of years. And as the tītī are faithful to their home, they continue returning."
She has been able to help the trust care for the birds.
"And being on the ground with them, handling them, came really naturally to me, and in the face of so many unknowns, it’s something that I can actually do to help in this world, albeit small. It feels good."
For this project Clarke, who is finishing her master’s at Ilam School of Fine Arts in Christchurch where she also works part-time lecturing in photography, filmed the tītī making their nightly return flight from feeding at sea to their alpine burrows with a thermal imaging device capable of turning electromagnetic radiation into visible light.
Lines of text connecting tītī, darkness and sensory experience are threaded through Night Writing, challenging the authority of vision and the ethics of image-making.
"There are parallels between the tītī and ourselves, they navigate by the stars too, but there is much we don’t know about them, and likely never will."
Title of pūrākau speaks to intensity of the fire
A fire that blackened the rocks, as a title, alludes to pūrākau recounting a young Kāti Māmoe woman, Hakitekura, who swam across an icy Whakatipu Waimāori and lit a fire on the opposite side using a dry kauati and bundle of raupō she brought with her tied to her back. A fire that can blacken rocks has an intensity to it - it is able to be seen from a great distance before smouldering into an enduring signal.
To see:
"A fire that blackened the rocks", Conor Clarke, Eleanor Cooper and Kate Te Ao Te Atamira, Queenstown, until September 19.
