Glistening
solo show at Three Eyes Gallery, Breaker Bay, Wellington, 5 Apr - 5 May, 2024
Glistening brings together multiple artworks from a year-long project that has represented a shift in Tara Luty’s practice toward more minimal and abstract works. This project has been specific to a wetland on the eastern shores of Wairarapa Moana – Boggy Pond.
Since living in Pōneke, Tara has been drawn to the Wairarapa many times for tramping and camping on the lake or coast. The region’s land has so obviously been drastically altered; distinctly European-looking, deciduous willows and tall cypress trees line straight fences and roads that create perfectly rectangular parcels of pasture where livestock grazes. In the centre of it all lies Wairarapa Moana, a large, muddied body of water whose seasonal fluctuations have been halted, whose inhabitants and dependants have dwindled, and whose water has been polluted. Yet this lake is a taonga, a gift from the atua, a revered tipuna. It is a place of mana and mauri, and it has witnessed the migration of many different peoples. Wairarapa Moana’s repo/wetlands border the lake, bridging where water and the earth meet, creating space for myriad life forms to thrive. This is where collaboration is necessary.
Tara’s creative collaboration with Boggy Pond has been in the processes of dipping substrates (paper, linen, hemp) in the repo’s mud – giving it agency to make its own marks – and in making paints from pigment made from mud. In both processes, the wetland is giving the artist a gift. In exchange Tara creates artworks that voice the ways in which this whenua has been conceptualised, contained, and controlled by colonial ideas and practices. She demonstrates through these collaborative processes that working with the more-than-human is vital in adapting to the ecological challenges we face in the present and future.
15% of every sale from this exhibition will be donated to wetland restoration.