Rest Areas

Steeples reaching for the heavens began as my response to seeing people increasingly spend more and more of their lives looking down at their mobile phones, oblivious to the world around them. My interest turned towards the support structures underpinning these needs and their impact on the land, both urban and rural. This project is a collection of cell towers in the New Zealand landscape. The towers are ubiquitous and mingle in our surroundings, some in a covert manner, others quite conspicuously, yet we mostly ignore their presence. But it is their rising proliferation that reminded me that we are forever entangled in modernity, wherever we are.

Walking upstream with Oakley Creek Essay by Professor Dr Robin Kearns I often exit the shared cycling and walking path that runs along Great North Road and walk onto the trail that skirts Te Auaunga/Oakley Creek. Doing so is to step through a portal into a corridor of imperfect beauty. The path is broken but the land is being healed. Here, for almost two decades, volunteers have weeded, planted and cared for this place. Gradually its mana is being restored. I too have planted and plucked rubbish from the riverbank. But more commonly I have just walked. The waters of Oakley Creek have become part of my place. I know each bend and I am not alone. A friend tells me he cannot stay away: the Creek has become his Walden Pond. In its presence, the stream speaks to those who listen. We are drawn to water if we allow it to beckon us. It is as if we are attracted by a centripetal force. The stream forges a curvature to serve its gushing artery. There is a pulsing energy from the heart of the isthmus, contesting attempts to contain its course. Straight lines, by contrast, are the city’s motif: lines mark the middle of roads, edges of buildings, the geometries of boundaries. But streams have their own reasoning, carving a course of least resistance; passing mossy rocks and through gaps between them. The flow knows its own compass, seeking out the sea. Kennedy Warne has described the Creek as one of the “unkempt edges of the familiar”. Here, neglect and nurture co-exist; rotting stumps of pines, perforated by burrowing insects, and newly planted natives stand side by side. It’s a place of the unexpected. Kawakawa, karaka, kahikatea: is there a shade of green absent in the palette of this ravine? Suddenly there can be a pair of ducks, struggling upstream over tiny rapids to rest within a pool of their own; next moment the deep-throated rasp of a heron high in a pine tree is a sentinel to the setting sun. Between the ominous brick of the former asylum on one side and the newly widened Great North Road on the other, the tree-filled ravine dulls the city’s sounds. There are remnants of gentler times: rock walls crafted from basalt lava flows and rusted artefacts of early industry. Parts of a boiler lie on the riverside suggesting the Japanese idea of wabi sabi, that poignancy of passing of time and inevitability of decay. Some days, the Creek smells stale with a hint of detergent. Yet on summer days, the young and the brave jump from the waterfall, oblivious to pollution warnings. Will purity of the water one day be restored? We need clean waterways for more than just the integrity of the life they support. As Thomas Berry writes, the more tainted our planet’s waterways become the less we appreciate water’s significance. Tainted streams, he says, diminish our understanding of clarity and water’s ritual uses become degraded in the collective consciousness. Above the waterfall, the path ascends from the valley and embraces the city again – winding past sports fields, the cycleway and train tracks. Then a choice: descend to greet the stream again or branch off back into the busy world. Michel de Certeau writes of two types of walking: the strategic and the tactical. Roads and cycleways offer strategies: they prompt people to keep left and keep moving. They are logically constructed to efficiently ensure we get from points A to B. Tactics are more nuanced: ways of walking involving shortcuts, pauses, and memories. The Creek encourages tactics. It suggests stepping off the path to observe the water’s flow, a pool’s reflection or some small life form. Through the tactic of lingering, we expose ourselves to the watery influences on wellbeing. Beyond the bush, tendrils of the waterway reach up into higher ground along culverts and through tunnels. Yet the Creek has the last words: “contain and constrain me at your peril”, it seems to say. Managing routes through channels and kerbs works most days. But venture to the riverbank with caution during a storm. Then the waterway roars and trees are ripped out by their roots. There are no delicate scenes when a stream is in flood. Be warned by the debris caught waist-high in those tree branches. As James K. Baxter wrote ‘The creek has to run muddy before it can run clear’. A rich metaphor for the human journey. The Creek asks little of us but to walk attentively in its presence. Can we slow down and be moved by its fluid talk?

The source of inspiration for the Garden in Motion is neglected land (friche): a parcel of land left behind (délaissé) to the unhindered development of those plants that settle there. On such pieces of land , the existing sources of energy – growth, struggle, shifting, exchange – do not encounter the obstacles usually set up to oblige nature to yield to geometry, to tidiness, or any other cultural principal. Garden in Motion recommends maintaining those species that decide where they wish to grow. Gilles Clément, The Garden in Motion, Quodlibet 2011 These photographs are my observations of these dense areas that are seemingly chaotic in manner and prosper in parallel to the order of the built-up urban environments. These evolving, urban wildernesses grow alongside the network of streams that wind their way through Auckland suburbs. another aspect documents these spaces that are, for many, a simple refuge from the complexity of city life.

A project documenting the fixed gear bike scene that centered around Tim White's bike shop in Auckland and is a snapshot of the culture and friendship of the crews that frequent his store. "It doesn't really matter what bike you've got, it's just rad riding really fast through town feeling like you are going to die any second and dealing with it, it's way better than walking." Conrad Smith

b.side was a street magazine about New Zealand music. The aim to present in-depth stories and interviews that covered a wide range of musical genres, plus stories on those whose work or interests overlapped the musical field. Offering musicians a forum to meet and talk freely about their work and their lives provided the reader candid insights into the art of these influential artists and musicians and their creative process. The fundamental aim was to share these stories with music lovers in a format rich with creative photography that informed the character and style of the music and musicians.

Portraits are usually flattering or at least self deprecating enough to be charming and seemingly sincere. One hangs portraits of themselves and their families in the home as signifiers of a communal happiness and general satisfaction with life. Portraits are produced as a historical record of the vitality of the sitter, as evidence of them having ‘lived’. There was in the early days of photography what we would think of now as a rather bizarre kind of image being commonly made; the post mortem photograph. Infant mortality rates were exceedingly high and photographing a dead child was often a way of preserving their cherished memory. More than often the deceased was placed within a highly composed family tableau, sitting idle as though asleep amongst other living family members. In one case an embalmed body was exhumed after two and half years to pose with the family ... These works take inspiration from a deceptively simple question that Lascelles and Nyberg have been asking people for years, “How will you die?”. Answers range from the downright deranged to the absurdly comical, and naturally, the artists gathered together their favourite responses. Each person was then asked if they would be willing to enact their death scene as a constructed reality. What results then is a sort of negative portrait, an inversion of the natural order of the portrait as both an historical record and a signifier of happiness and a satisfied life of the sitter. The image itself is a lie, the scene is a construction, it’s not ‘real’, the elements within the image have been painfully composed into an order, the lighting agonised over to cast the right shadow, create the most desired atmosphere. As Picasso once stated “art is a lie that reveals the truth’. Yet these images are alarmingly honest, they uncover a psychology and give us a greater insight into the person portrayed than a typically commissioned portrait could ever hope to do. It reveals a certain desire, a certain awkward acceptance of a common fate. And that fate is often violent, tragic but always somehow comical and fascinating. Death has never looked so good... and has never laughed so hard. Daniel Clifford