It's been an unproductive time for me this past month unfortunately. Aside from the installation at Window Gallery, I've been dealing with some health issues that have taken up a lot of time and mental energy, so am feeling a bit behind on where I'd like to be with studio work as a result. Still, here is a brief run down of what I've been working on and upcoming plans towards midyear :)
What's been happening in studio:
I think it might be a good time to re-write my studio proposal, as I feel like it's changed a little since I enrolled in the MFA. My primary focus is still on abiotic relationships and that question of "how much of a mountain remains in a wall?"... thinking in terms of non-human agency, geological histories, human-rock interactions, and the idea of scale (in terms of time, material, entity, etc.). I've continued to focus on three mountains in particular - Maungakiekie/Cornwall Park, Maungawhau/Mt Eden, and Maungarei/Mt Wellington. The reasoning behind this is in part their shared material qualities and histories, and their location - all of them, including the forms their quarried materials have created, are in proximity to me, and while I don't intend on ruling out more distant peaks, these for now are accessible entry points into my studies. This makes scanning the walls and visiting related sites simple, which given weather conditions recently is a plus! Maungarei currently links into the experiments along the Tamaki Drive shoreline I've been doing (inspired in part by past research on Rangitoto and the proximity/visibility of the island from the shore), as I learned much of the seawall is comprised of rock from the old Mt Wellington quarry. I like the concept of two mountains looking out at each other, in their various forms...
Around all of this, I've been continuing to focus on point cloud forms and photogrammetry - focusing on long walls in my neighbourhood (Mt Eden) and individual rocks gathered and observed from various structures around the city (the later are more portrait-like). I have also been looking into sound recording, and have been trying to learn how to use contact microphones to record the vibrations felt by the stone structures (UK sound artist Jez Riley French has been incredibly helpful around this). This idea ties back into the concept of mountains 'looking' at each other or communicating beyond themselves (think the heat from the sun to the soil to the kumara...) - I would like to record at some of these old quarry sites and in turn on the forms created from their materials, in order to create an abstract dialogue of sound...
Along with these projects, I have been making plans towards particular printing projects inspired by NASA images of small celestial bodies - in particular, the below images of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko taken during the Rosetta-Philae mission. The comet has a unique shape, as many do, which initially made classifying and imaging it a challenge - through developments in technology over the years, NASA gradually obtained better images until its shape and structure was visible. (Sources: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5)
The two-lobe shape of the comet [are] the result of a gentle, low-velocity collision of two objects, and is called a contact binary. The "terraces", layers of the interior of the comet that have been exposed by partial stripping of outer layers during its existence, are oriented in different directions in the two lobes, indicating that two objects fused to form Churyumov–Gerasimenko




I think "piecing together" prints made from images of the subjects and ecologies I'm studying could be curious in thinking about how these structures are assembled, the imaging of them, geology and landscapes in general (and in the context of this city, perhaps), scale and time,... are they the same, different, individual, components,...? As always, I love the ambiguity of them, and that element is something I enjoy exploring in my own work. My hope is to use stills from my moving image works and individual point cloud studies to create 'pieced together' assemblages of prints in a similar fashion.
In looking into how planetary bodies are categorised, many definitions seem to be based on exclusion - what they aren't rather than what they are - i.e. asteroids, aka "minor planets", are "astronomical objects in direct orbit around the Sun that is exclusively classified as neither a planet nor a comet that orbits within the inner Solar System.") Which brings me back to thinking about the rocks and the walls and the mountains... The boundaries between things aren't so clear.

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