Wk 3 // studio work & planning

General summary (will upload images of experiments later this week once collated into individual posts):

• Am still unsure of what I want to write on for the first lit review, but am tossing up between a chapter of Geoff Park's Theatre Country, Richard Coyne's "The Book of Stones" (in Network Nature), Hannah Stark's "The Cultural Politics of Mourning" and/or writing on Kate van der Drift's cameraless image works. Aiming to have a draft of at least one done by the end of the week. Leaning towards texts that focus on geological histories, non-human agency, the concept of landscape

• I feel like I've been trying to do everything all at once, and it's been more overwhelming than productive! Am feeling very much in general experimentation mode still, but feel like I'm beginning to channel things down into specific projects (details below).

• Two strands are emerging so far: one looking at alternative ways of documenting and imaging the land via hands-on processes (solargraphs; collecting, sampling, surveying etc.); the other focusing on the history of Auckland's geology, its missing, altered and quarried volcanic peaks, and the material interconnection that remains, envisioned via digital media.
  

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Digital work

"Mountain Climbers"

This project builds off of interests and digital processes from last year, and focuses on an aspect of Tāmaki Makaurau's geography and geology via a comical event that took place during the Covid-19 lockdown. I am not a rock climber myself, but during the 2020 and 2021 lockdowns, many of my city-dwelling bouldering friends got incredibly frustrated with not being able to climb. According to them, there are very few places to climb at the best of times, and those that were usually available were closed due to public health measures. Encouraged by government recommendations to go outside for some fresh air each day, some took to interesting measures on their daily walks.

In a city where so many of the mountains have been quarried away and repurposed into fences, walls and monuments during the early years of Auckland's construction, some climbers began charting routes up the basalt and scoria structures in their neighbourhoods. Popular rock-climbing websites Bouldermap.app and TheCrag.com began having routes regularly submitted to their database from people scaling public monuments, historic walls, quarried spaces and stone pillars around the city, many of which have since been removed from the web but some of which still remain documented today.

(video above sourced from a climbing group on Facebook, 2022)

The destruction of the mountains places them in a strange space of existence - they are still present in some way in the city, either visible in building materials or the landscape in something of their existing forms, but heavily changed through colonial development. The city is built both on them and of them, with individual suburbs often having old structures made from their respective maunga, and others having pieces of those across town forming their roads and buildings. The mountains are no longer confined to a single place or fixed location and could now be just about anywhere and in any number of stone formations in the city. They are things, places, objects, entities, but many all at once in many different places... They have shaped the city, both pre- and post-colonisation, in one way or another.

Thinking about these structures made from volcanic materials and these climbers' desire to get to the top of their chosen routes paints a slightly comical mental image for me, but I also think there's something to be unpacked there - the existence of the mountains in a new form that retains some of their original thingness, their dispersed nature within the city, the history of Western capitalistic ownership over them vs. indigenous practices and beliefs, a growing culture of ecological awareness, and the climbers' thoughts of "that looks like a nice rock to climb"... When it came to thinking about some of the existing official climbing routes, most of which are now closed (Mt Eden Quarry for example), many are located at old quarry or mining pit sites. Maungarei Springs site out in Stonefields, Mt Wellington for example is located in an old quarry, where climbers now begin their routes at the bottom of the dug out hole, well below 'original' ground level; climbing upside down and inside out, occupying a displaced space where there was once tonnes of rock.

To process these thoughts, I initially started by taking photos of friends in the sport when out on urban climbing expeditions, specifically on walls/structures made of volcanic rock, but also on naturally occurring ones (i.e. Waiheke Island). I've since started taking video recordings and photographs of the volcanic walls themselves - mini mountain ranges, with elements of their old and new locations present - and visualising them as point clouds (I think the semi fictional aspect of the medium lends itself to them well, but I hope to expand on this further as time goes on). There's a feeling of condensing of space when exploring these subjects - many potential mountains meeting in one spot. Although, even in that and now making images from them, there's an idea of what a mountain looks like and what they actually were like... there's a kind of mythologising that still takes place perhaps, at least to me. Perhaps it's a bit too romantic, but it's interesting to me.

Questions I'm asking myself: how does the landscape shift? How does it retain its thingness?

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Mapping, surveying and image-making

Lumen prints and solargrams (looking from, through and on the land on its own time and processes)

I know fairly little about traditional photography practices and processes, having worked mostly digitally, but have been trying to learn more about them after getting curious about Joyce Campbell's daguerreotypes. In taking inspiration from artists like Nova Paul, Kate van der Drift and Melanie King (her tutorials linked below) who have used organic materials in the development of images, I've also been considering how I could do something similar by linking site, image and process directly in the creation of works. After learning about how salt can be a component in darkroom processes and printing, I've been looking into ways to bring an element of the land into the process of image making itself via collecting sea salt and saltwater from the ocean. Initially I wanted to see if I could make salt prints or make glass from beach sands to create some kind of looking lens, but at these are ambitious plans and it's early days I've decided to keep things simple for myself for now and put those on the backburner (I'm still building myself a mini forge in my free time though...).

Currently, I'm in the process of making a series of small solargraph cameras to place in various locations around Tāmaki Makaurau, beginning with Tāmaki Drive and Rangitoto since they look directly out to one another and are easily accessible. I also intend on making lumen prints of images photographed in those locations once I have my supplies sorted - I've recently learned that salt water can be used as a lumen print fixative, and I hope to attempt to fix some of the resulting images with salt and water collected from locations around the Waitematā, again involving the landscape in creating its image somehow... In relation to Rangitoto, the idea of salt-fixed prints also taps into some of the island's history, where once there was a salt processing plant at Mackenzie Bay: the Colonial Salt Manufacturing and Refinement Company. My main wish behind this is to explore the idea of looking in alternative ways that disrupt traditional Western ideas of viewing a 'landscape', and that reflect and involve the land in its own conceptualisation, on its own time...

Resources:

As an Aucklander from the North Shore, I never realised until recently how much I value being able to see both the ocean and landforms across it until visiting family in New Plymouth - looking out over the West Coast, the vastness of the ocean and the sheer sense of vulnerability it brought on, being so small and untethered in its presence, made me realise how much I appreciate living in a city where I feel quite literally 'grounded'. In walking along Tāmaki Drive, overlooked in Mission Bay by the home my grandparents, father and aunt once lived in, I often end up watching the shoreline and seawall, constructed in part with basalt quarried from Mt Wellington. You can still see some of the lava flow patterns in parts of its lower rocks, and it's interesting thinking about how the ocean is touching the this volcanic rock in different places at once (here and on Rangitoto in the distance); and of the idea of these two volcanoes looking out at one another across the water...

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Ongoing mini projects:

(In honesty, I don't want these to take up too much of my time as I'm really enjoying looking into the narrative and historical aspects around the other two project ideas above.)

Chemigrams and colour experiments

After making some homemade litmus paper last week, I did a few small tests of the water around Tāmaki Makaurau's beaches while on iron and sand collecting ventures :) I was interested in seeing if they would have much variation to them. You could probably achieve better colour variation if professional litmus paper was used, but it was curious seeing what colour an unseen quality of the landscape would create when given the opportunity... I half wonder if this could be used to create a moving image work of some kind, like the lichen + Resene colour experiment video last week. Of the experiments so far, I think I'm enjoying the lichen dye one the most and the subtle differences in its surface. Taking inspiration from Herman de Vrie's practice, I want to continue making similar works that document the colour of the earth and lichens in surveyed locations.

Repurposed maps and new shores

I stumbled across a website called Climate Central last week when looking into Melanie King's practice - it allows you to see what areas of the world would be either prone to flooding or completely underwater with a 2'C and 4'C rise in temperature, as well as estimates for 10, 20, 30, etc. years in the future if we continue along the current climate trajectory that we're on...

I picked up a few simple maps of the Hauraki Gulf islands on a whim in hopes of abstracting some information from them. Things of note

• Circles - wherever there's a landmark, point of interest or complicated piece of mapwork, there's a circle. I like the form parallel between the Mars rock drilling samples, circular lenses, map keys, pointclouds, concretions, etc...

• Colour coding - there's a uniform scheme with the Hauraki Gulf island brochures; the colour choices reflect an idea of greenery but also a sense of simplicity, familiarity, uniformity, consistency (useful for marketing I suppose); they're very simple documents and readily available to the public, more complex maps have to be looked for elsewhere

• Orientation is uncertain - it's determined by the orientation of the symbols on the map; the map is orientated to match an approach via ferry routes

Taking inspiration from Amanda, it is my intention to blend some into paper as I want to see what the topography of a map itself could be, and if they could be envisioned as landscapes in themselves. Much like the Resene colour sorting, I'm also curious to see what colours emerge in the process. Using the maps as locational guides for collecting images or materials is also something I'd like to try. perhaps in Rangitoto as a starting point - surveying the difference between mapped points of interest vs. the subtle ecologies that are there...