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Rua Kōhatu | Two Stones
- with Jake Kīanō Skinner (Ngāti Rangitihi, Tūhoe)
- Single Channel Video
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Masons Screen
- Circuit Artist Moving Image
- Wellington
- March 2024
- Images: Noel Meek
In this film, musicians Jake Kīanō Skinner (Ngāti Rangitihi, Tūhoe) and Noel Meek explore their long-running relationship through a shared musical material, stone. Commonly used in the taonga pūoro that Skinner practices and also within the experimental musical traditions that Meek inhabits, both artists consider the lithic as actants and collaborators in their music.
In their relational approach to stone, the artists look to the strata of history. Hone Tuwhare’s poetry is a key influence, in particular his 'Thoughts On A Sufi Proverb' which is quoted in the film. Further layers are gathered from the pūrākau that describe the formation of Ngā Kohatu Whakarakaraka o Tamatea Pōkai Whenua / The Port Hills, where the film was shot. In one pūrākau, the hills are formed from an act of violence by Māui, who smothers a vanquished giant in stones, and in another, by Tūterakiwhanoa piling up the sweepings of the Canterbury Plains. The music created by Skinner and Meek reflects these accumulations of history and mythology in the landscape, of stone upon stone.
Text from "Thoughts On A Sufi Proverb" by Hone Tuwhare (Ngā Puhi, Ngāti Korokoro, Ngāti Tautahi, Te Popote, Uri-o-Hau). Reproduced from Small Holes In The Silence with kind permission of Rob Tuwhare and the Hone Tuwhare Trust.
“The stones seem to be giving voice to the landscape—recalling Meek’s earlier conversations with the environment—in a collaboration that highlights the artists’ concern for constructive, bicultural relationships. From the perspective of the anthropocene, the work conveys a desire to communicate with, or give voice to, nature at a time when the environmental issues facing humanity seem insurmountable. Tuwhare’s poem is layered throughout the work like strata, evoking the deep layers of history embedded in the whenua of Aotearoa. In it, we are given visions of the dark side of the moon, and the erosion of rock, crumbling to sand and eventually ancestral dust: a deep time that eclipses the span of human existence.”
Bronwyn Holloway-Smith
Commissioned by CIRCUIT and Wellington City Council.
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How Libraries Think
- with the Staff of Ngā Kete Wānanga-o-Ōtautahi Christchurch City Libraries
- Performance Work
- Ōtautahi Tiny Performance Festival
- Tūranga | Central Library
- Christchurch
- May 2024
- Images: Olivia Webb and Charlie Underhill
A composition for librarians, library collection, and library. A concert that employed library staff as performers to explore the multi-being relationships between the diverse staff of Ngā Kete Wānanga-o-Ōtautahi, their varied library collections, and the central building they work from, Tūranga.
Drawing on contemporary cosmological theories, How Libraries Think took Eduardo Kohn's 2013 book on multi-being interactions in the Amazon, How Forests Think, as a starting point for exploring complex ecologies in a large urban library system. The composition asked amateur (and some professional) musicians in the library network to develop a piece of music with the composer that would reflect the cultural importance of libraries and perhaps find new relationships with their collections and architecture that might reflect thinking about multi-being relationships that was indigenous to Aotearoa.
Performed by Charlotte Dowle, Lyn Malakou, Moata Tamaira (Ngāti Tūwharetoa), Justice-Manawanui Arahanga-Pryor (Ngāi Tahu, Te Āti Haunui-a-Pāpārangi, Ngāti Awa ki Rangitaiki, Ngā Puhi), Malcolm Riddoch, Jill Larking, Helen Mepham, Hamish Campbell, Roberto Dazzaro, Mik Clapson, and Nicole Reddington.
Artist Q&A: https://sounz.org.nz/articles/2024-sounz-community-commission
Commissioned by SOUNZ Centre for New Zealand Music
- Walking Scores
- with Elliot Vaughan
- Performance Work
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Performance Arcade
- Wellington
- February 2024
- Photos: Camus Wyatt
From the mid-twentieth century onwards, walking has become a way for artists to explore relationships between body, sculpture, theory, and social relations in art. In particular, walking has been used as a way to escape institutional strictures in art, freeing practitioners from gallery architecture, weighty materials, and commercial restraints.
To explore this, Noel Meek and Elliot Vaughan commissioned new walking performance scores by Aotearoa artists John Vea, Louie Zalk-Neale (Ngāi te Rangi), Rob Thorne (Ngāti Tumutumu), and Sonya Lacey. With performances every day of The Performance Arcade in February 2024, Meek and Vaughan explored a rich and challenging artistic ecology showing walking’s potential as an aesthetic, social and political action.
Read a rundown of the project here:
https://www.theperformancearcade.com/post/pa-reviews-four-travelling-works-by-quinoa---chris-kirk
- Kōrero with Stone (about Deep Time)
- with Jake Kīanō Skinner
(Ngāti Rangitihi, Tūhoe)
and a block of Oamaru limestone
- Site Specific Performance Work
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Performance Art Week Aotearoa
- Christchurch
- November 2023
- Photos: Olivia Webb and Sara Cowdell
A kōrero with a large free standing block of Oamaru limestone in a circular plaza outside The Gym at Toi Matatiki Toi Ora.
As part of Performance Art Week Aotearoa, Meek and Skinner engaged Stone in a musical conversation discussing and exploring what Stone thinks about where Stone has come from, how it feels to be cut from living stone that once was living flesh, stone that is now on dry land but once was underwater, stone that is from another place but is now here. What does Stone think and does Stone want to reply?
- Weather Assemblage
- with Rāhana Winiata Tito-Taylor (Ngā Puhi, Ngāti Whātua, Tainui), Jake Kīanō Skinner (Ngāti Rangitihi, Tūhoe), Rob Thorne (Ngāti Tumutumu), Eamon Edmundsen-Wells, Sean Martin-Buss, and Len Lye’s Storm sculptures
- Site Specific Performance Work
- Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
- New Plymouth
- August 2023
- Photos: Ilse de Klerk
Video: Belmont Studios and Chris Watson at SOUNZ
Essay by Susan Ballard:
https://govettbrewster.com/explore-art/editorial/a-long-held-breath
Written for taonga pūoro, The Modular Aerophone, and Len Lye’s Storm sculptures, Weather Assemblage was a collaborative performance score exploring the rich tonal structures of Lye’s kinetic works, the famously wild Taranaki weather that these sculptures were inspired by, and the complex cultural interplay of presenting these works in a contemporary setting.
Len Lye was long influenced by and created in response to weather. Writer Janine Randerson “place[s] Len Lye at the beginning of the trajectory of meteorological art.” [1] Weather Assemblage took this idea and examined through Lye’s work how we relate to our environment in Aotearoa, and how music and its performance can explore, present, and embody ways of being that are respectful to the natural world.
The score began with the idea of humans collaborating musically with non-human performers. This is especially relevant in the context of Aotearoa as for practitioners of taonga pūoro instruments are people, with whakapapa, identity, and agency in their music. They are tied to whenua through their materials and to their community through their history. This idea calls for respect towards the natural world and the non-human, and helps position Weather Assemblage as a critique of the environmentally destructive nature of modern human society.
The Modular Aerophone is an instrument constructed by Eamon Edmundson-Wells and Sean Martin-Buss which was repurposed and expanded forWeather Assemblage. Composed of a collection of European brass instruments connected together with commercial garden hoses, valves, and taps, the instrument formed a sprawling network across the gallery, able to be played by one or multiple performers. Installed especially for the opening weekend of Storm, this instrument was a site for connection and reconnection, explored through improvisation, installation, and tubes.
Weather Assemblage brought together te ao Māori and te ao Pākehā, combined traditional and contemporary music making practices, blended sculptural and compositional art approaches, invited the weather into the gallery, and attempted to find a place for humans in the realms of the non-human.
[1]Randerson, Weather as Medium: Toward a Meteorological Art, MIT Press, 2018
- Mirror Three
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with Yan Jun
- Sound installation
Group of Three interprets Mirror Three
with Sean Martin-Buss and Jess Robinson
Site Specific Performance Work
- Te Tuhi
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Auckland
- Photos: Alena Kavka
Mirror Three is part of a continuing series of collaborative sound and video works between Ōtautahi-based Noel Meek and Beijing-based Yan Jun. Their work explores two lived environments a world apart.
Yan Jun’s “micro feedback” techniques, utilising very small microphones and speakers, reflect the intensely urban, anthropocentric Beijing environment he primarily works in. Noel Meek’s found materials (including stone, metals, wood, plastics) echo the Ōtautahi Residential Red Zone that his workspace borders, drawing sonically on discarded objects and materials found in abandoned gardens and other non-anthropocentric places.
Jun and Meek’s collaborations are created according to tight pre-set parameters and neither artist hears the other’s work until the pieces are mixed. Each iteration of their “Mirror” series explores these divergent sound practices, reflecting both the contrasting locales each artist works in and allowing the sounds to forge their own relationships with each other.
Drawn from the divergent soundworlds in Ōtautahi and Beijing, Mirror Three took on new resonances in Te Tuhi’s Speaker Space in Pakuranga, Aotearoa, a location caught in the interstices of suburban and urban development.
- Archive Fever: New Zealand Underground Sound in Fanzine Interviews 1991–1999
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with Lasse Marhaug
- Book length publication
- Marhaug Forlag
- Oslo
- Photos: Soundohm
A book collecting interviews, artwork, and texts of New Zealand underground sound artists from fanzines in the years 1991-1999.
Collected and edited by Noel Meek. Texts by Noel Meek, Bruce Russell, Seymour Glass (Bananafish) and Nick Cain (Opprobrium). Cover illustration by Stefan Neville (Pumice).
308 pages, format: 18 x 24 cm
- Tidalectics
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with Olivia Webb
Performance Work
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Enjoy Contemporary Art Space
- Wellington
- March 2023
- Photos: Daniel Sanders
Video: Chris Watson at SOUNZ
“Blood, bile, intracellular fluid; a small ocean swallowed, a wild wetland in our gut; rivulets forsaken making their way from our insides to out, from watery womb to watery world: we are bodies of water.” Andrea Neimanis in Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology
A site-specific durational artwork, Resilience Training: Tidalectics explored the anxiety and joy of our relationship with water in the Anthropocene. A meditative performance, Tidalectics used water, sound, breath, and the body to explore our complex interactions with water as a bottled commodity, an oceanic connector, an inimical force in the climate crisis, and the bearer of all life on earth.
“All things are possessed of wai although water may not be present; all entities manifest as one-of-many, and therefore have their existence as an influx . . . by the world.” Carl Te Hira Mika (Tūhourangi) in “When ‘water’ meets its limits: A Māori speculation on the term wai”
Hydrological thinking challenges colonial thinking, challenges capitalist thinking, it seeps in and undermines individualist thought. It does this by disregarding barriers and borders, real and imagined, by overflowing and soaking into disparate worlds and connecting them osmotically.
“Just as the sea is an open and ever-flowing reality, so should our oceanic identity transcend all forms of insularity, to become one that is openly searching, inventive, and welcoming." Epeli Hau’ofa in “The Ocean in Us”
“It takes me back & drags me tidalectic into this tangled urgent meaning to & fro . like foam . saltless as from the bottom of the sea . dragging our meaning our moaning/song from Calabar along the sea-fl-oor sea-floor with pebble sound & conch & wound & sea-sound moon.” Kamau Brathwaite in Barabajan Poems 1492–1992
- Homage to Annea Lockwood
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with Mattin
Book and CD publication
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Recital
- Los Angeles
- 2023
- Photos: Soundohm
Recital presents a book and CD homage to the New Zealand-born American composer Annea Lockwood (b. 1939). The unique concept for this album was conceived by artists Noel Meek (Aotearoa) and Mattin (Basque Country), who each share a deep admiration for Lockwood. A longform Skype conversation between the three artists was arranged at the end of 2020. They discussed politics, aesthetics, and Annea’s compositional practice, among other things. Noel Meek & Mattin had from the beginning decided that the conversation itself would be used as a score for this album, Homage to Annea Lockwood.
“My work is my way of exploring the world,” says Lockwood. Each piece on the album reflects her prismatic compositional practice: sound maps, scores that unfold temporally or environmentally, synchronous with nature, and pianos transplanted to exotic locations (often engulfed in flames). Meek & Mattin maintain a playfulness and curiosity of Annea’s sound world; from electronic verbal fizz, a recording of lighting a laptop on fire, hydrophonic diaries from underneath an old willow tree in New Zealand, to a polyphonic choral piece which concludes the album.
Homage to Annea Lockwood is housed in a hand-numbered paperback book, which carries a full transcription of the conversation, in this case… the score, along with lush photographic documentation, and ending with a lovely afterword written by Annea Lockwood.
- Awa Orotau: River Attunement
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with Oro Group and the Pigeon Bay Stream
Three Channel Video Installation
Circuit Artist Moving Image
Wellington
March 2023
Video: Noel Meek and Olivia Webb
Mātauranga Māori advice: Māia Abraham (Ngāi te Rangi, Ngāi Tūhoe), Jake Kīanō Skinner (Ngāti Rangitihi, Ngāi Tūhoe).
In a time of hydrological crises, we ask how being kōpūwai, being watery, can help us navigate this age. Towards this, Awa Orotau: River Attunement, explores being in tune with the world by being in tune with water and its mauri. The video was shot in the Pigeon Bay stream on Horomaka / Banks Peninsula at Hays Reserve, a tiny piece of remnant old growth forest preserved by Pākehā landowners. This was one of the cleanest, safest rivers available locally to Ōtautahi.
With thanks to Christchurch Creative Communities.