Installation
Te Wai Ngutu Kākā Gallery
Tāmaki Makaurau
March 2025
This exhibition presented conversations between myself and two landscapes on opposite coasts of Te Waipounamu: Te Riu o Te Aika Kawa in Waitaha and the Denniston Plateau above Kawatiri. Both landscapes are tied to home, and I spent years exploring them before deciding to engage them musically as you experience here.
Te Riu o Te Aika Kawa is an estuary in the Residential Red Zone in Ōtautahi, an area cleared of housing following the 2010-2011 Christchurch earthquakes. My wife and I lived on the edge of this landscape for four years, watching as the land, once suburban gardens and streets, filled with water each winter and subsided further and further into rapidly expanding wetlands. Walking in this landscape, past drunken power poles and the decaying remains of fences and walls, a sense of unworlding was inescapable; one world had irrevocably ended, but another was coming into existence, a watery one that perhaps reflected what the place was like before European settlers tried to tame it. Te Riu o Te Aika Kawa is itself human-made, a remnant of the old Waimakariri river mouth, redirected around 1900 to help with developing settlements that have since disappeared.
The Weather Flutes, presented on the gallery wall and performed with in Te Riu o Te Aika Kawa, are constructed from a domestic water pipe found in this Red Zone.
My extended family moved to the Denniston Plateau from Falkirk, Scotland in the 1920s. They were coal miners, and my father grew up in this bleak and beautiful landscape. The community collapsed in the 1960s when the mines closed and, much like the Red Zone, the land returned to what it had once been, a unique alpine ecosystem. It is now under threat of further mining, as the current government plans to expand work at Stockton, Aotearoa’s largest open cast mine, which is just down the road. My brother works at this mine and liberated the Coal, which is presented in the middle of the gallery. After the exhibition Coal will not go on to be burned for steel making in China as the rest of their brethren from Stockton are).
This cycle of unworlding and reworlding is what I hoped to discuss with Coal under the plateau, as Aotearoa coal has a memory going back some 50 million years (coal, like many things here, is very young compared to other parts of the world), and also with Te Riu o Te Aika Kawa whose memory similarly goes back further than human comprehension. These long memories may have perspectives on the ends of worlds that humans can learn from.
Works
1. without dirtying the water (speaking with Te Riu o Te Aika Kawa), 2025. Single channel 4K video, stereo sound. 21 minutes 53 seconds.
2. Erthe toc of Erthe (speaking with Coal on the Denniston Plateau), 2025. Single channel 4K video, stereo sound. 14 minutes 52 seconds.
3. Weather Flutes, 2024. Constructed from found materials near Te Riu o Te Aika Kawa, with natural weathering.
4. Coal (liberated), 2024. Liberated from Stockton Mine, Kawatiri.