Often through western culture landscape becomes perceived as a theatrical space to admire, a commodity to behold, and a source of entertainment. My practice explores ideas that subvert this traditional documentation of land, using found objects to invent filming devices that venture into varying terrains. Through this unconventional method of recording and viewing, I am able to document new ways of encountering land. Materials become parameters for me to engage with and make something out of. Thus, land is re-explored through these semi-functional, invented camera apparatuses.
I am drawn to the experience of land containing different levels of recognition rather than just conventional relationships through movies and entertainment resources. We are advertised the experience of grandeurs and amusements landscapes offer, which businesses such as tourism and film industries capitalise from. Companies like Google offer an online rating system to critique public spaces and tourist attractions, inviting a Technoculture-driven dialogue around land. My current exploration uses a child-sized bike as an exploratory mechanism, which I take to various sites that reflect notions of such ‘bountiful’ scenery. Various found materials such as plant pots, soup cans, wood planks and petrol receipts become attached to the bike, acting as extensions to hold an iPhone to film the terrain. An altered experience of the site becomes explored as the bike is ridden on a short journey through the terrain, hinting pseudo-scientific themes of unorthodox research, as terrains become encountered through this absurd but deliberate method.
The idea of well-known attractions such as the Bay of Islands and Milford Sound is interesting to explore through absurd apparatus, and within the public realm too, while at the same time exploring less glorified sites such as a friend’s suburban backyard or a duckpond at a city park. I am interested in the attempt and failure of documenting these sites that have been subjected to a western-based stance through history. Through my project, I seek to question ways of traditional views and re-examine what values are indicated through this, and how they are changed through newer perspectives. I aim for my work to sit within those conversations as a disruptor and contributor, in an exchange of further ways we could understand this land and its values within society.