traces left behind and imprints silently borne
mud (Boggy Pond, Wairarapa Moana) on linen, 197x230cm
![traces left behind and imprints silently borne alongside Supertrophic and Border[land], Massey University, 2023](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/810a71bde3bd12f80a34b661cdee207eb2257db4e1f14d566d935176ceb59084/0Y4A6758-28.jpg)
This work was made in collaboration with Boggy Pond, Wairarapa Moana wetlands, with the intention of giving agency to the repo in my making. Through repeatedly visiting the wetland, I slowly began to build a relationship with place. My conceptual and practical processes have been collaborative, representing a rejection of the Western separation of culture and nature, and emphasizing the importance of human and non-human cooperation in ecological regeneration and conservation.
Traces left behind and imprints silently borne was created by being placed in the mud, allowing the wetland to make marks on its linen substrate. The many raupō flower seeds are scattered across the work, hinting at the repo’s involvement in its making. The work plays with horizontality and verticality; it was made in the horizontal, which is visible in in the work, yet it has been hung in the vertical plane. This further subverts aesthetic dualisms and binaries that define what is painting, drawing, or object.
The title alludes to the wetland’s marks and originates from a quote by Geoff Park: “the brush should sketch a life, since a life – like the landscape – is constituted by the traces left behind and imprints silently borne” (Ngā Uruora 16). The work therefore talks of “landscape” as more than a view; it is a living entity made up of a multiplicity of life-forms, whose traces and imprints you may only begin to understand or know when you recognise the entanglements of cultural, ecological, and personal histories.
Traces left behind and imprints silently borne was created by being placed in the mud, allowing the wetland to make marks on its linen substrate. The many raupō flower seeds are scattered across the work, hinting at the repo’s involvement in its making. The work plays with horizontality and verticality; it was made in the horizontal, which is visible in in the work, yet it has been hung in the vertical plane. This further subverts aesthetic dualisms and binaries that define what is painting, drawing, or object.
The title alludes to the wetland’s marks and originates from a quote by Geoff Park: “the brush should sketch a life, since a life – like the landscape – is constituted by the traces left behind and imprints silently borne” (Ngā Uruora 16). The work therefore talks of “landscape” as more than a view; it is a living entity made up of a multiplicity of life-forms, whose traces and imprints you may only begin to understand or know when you recognise the entanglements of cultural, ecological, and personal histories.