September Seminar Crits Work

Updated: Sep 8, 2021

Link to access a digital booklet, 'Garden 2:' https://www.flipsnack.com/CDA9A788B7A/garden-2.html

Artist Statement:

Garden, 2021. Multimedia installation, moving image, digital booklet.

Works:

Bike construction: Child-sized bike; gaffer tape; found materials.

Video dur: 5.00 mins. Location: Waikato River, Huntly, opposite power station, near Info centre.

Book: Garden 2. Hand-written notes/diagrams of each object present on the bike.

Discarded materials are collected from my garden, attached in various iterations to a bike using gaffer-tape. This altered bike is taken to sites, such as the near Waikato river, to be ridden, pushed, and pulled within the terrain. An iPhone attached to the bike via gaffer tape documents the intervention at the site, resulting in a shaky, absurdly angled video of the landscape. This constructed apparatus is thus made into a filming-support to prospect into the landscape.

Places such as the Waikato are popular tourist destinations, due to their portrayal as aesthetic, photogenic spaces in new Zealand’s landscape. In depictions from as nature documentaries, landscape becomes shown as a majestic, pristine space, separate from humans and society. Through the bike-support, landscape is removed from its acclaimed status and re-explored through the bike-apparatus.

Adapted to lockdown, my previously travel-based project takes on a new way of responding to a space. Here, I am interested in install methods that examine the found objects through a new presentation strategy, exploring them through an interwoven, clustered form. Additionally, these materials I employ to construct the bike are presented in a photographic book, consisting of handwritten text and diagrams to play with these materials in a more intimate narrative.