Final Installations // Whitecliffe MFA & BFA(Hons) Graduation Exhibition 2022

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Script for On the horizon, just above the waves (2022)

Approximately 90 million kilometres from Earth, 5 minutes and 2.5 seconds in light speed, the rover Perseverance is making its way across an ancient shoreline. At a pace of 100 meters per hour it is travelling through a place thought to have once been a vast lakebed at the base of a volcanic field, once fed by many rivers whose traces and pathways remain visible today. As it crosses the windswept landscape of its new home, it slowly moves towards its closest volcano in hopes of one day ascending its peak. All the while, as it maps and surveys the soil below, it is searching for life - likely past, or maybe present, or perhaps as a place for that of the future...

Approximately 600 years ago, Rangitoto emerged from the ocean. This island is a new place, a timeless place. Beneath its green appearance, it has been for most of its young life inhospitable to life as we know it - void of trees, birds, insects, and soil; an alien surface, still capable of radiating the heat absorbed from the midday sun, as if in remembrance of its birth.

Almost as surprising as its sudden appearance, across its sprawling surface of jagged scoria, life emerged. An unassuming, symbiotic organism found its place amongst the vast lava fields, tiny communities of algae and fungi. As these lichens took hold they burrowed into the rock, turning it to dust nanometre by nanometre; and over the course of hundreds of years of growth and disintegration, they created a regolith: the thin substrate upon which all plant life on the island relies. And with time and chance, and the silent processes of thousands of unassuming entities, the first pioneers and colonisers of the island - seeds carried across the waves on the wind - found root in this new earth.

Across the top of Rangitoto’s dormant crater lie caves and tunnels, created as the molten rock rushing from its peak cooled and hardened at a rate too slow to contain itself. These transitory spaces provide shelter for the insects, roots, and sunless microbes that call this place home, along with as well as the human visitors that journey through them. These places were once a shelter for the dead too – carefully carried across the rocky landscape to their quiet and final resting places within the veins of the land.

These places of transition are a reminder of the island’s energy, a shell marking its own journey as thousands of tonnes of lava rushed from its peak to escape to the water below. As the two made contact, newly emerged basalt scattered and froze, cooling to deep black and grey scoria. And occasionally, as the iron-rich rock encountered its new environment of sunlight, air, and water, oxidising to red.

On the horizon, just above the waves, a distant celestial neighbour can be seen, where Perseverance is making its slow ascent. This place has its own peaks and islands, perhaps having emerged from beneath its own waves and oceans long ago. Its glow is familiar, the oxidised landscape now reduced particles of volcanic dust and sand, billions of years of its own particulate history suspended within its atmosphere. Across its surface lie similar reminders of origin, familiar hints of structures and forms that might one day be home to travellers who manage to slip beyond the surface of the Earth and drift towards these ancient, red shores; to find shelter in its tunnels and caves, an alien yet strangely familiar landscape. Perhaps, already, these spaces are home for something, unseen or unfamiliar, to our eyes at least. Or perhaps they once were, and are now places of rest…