Seminar 3 Winter/July 2025

All that was there

Ruins stand as reminders. Memory is always incomplete, always imperfect, always falling into ruins; but the ruins themselves, like no other traces, are treasures: our guide to situating ourselves in a landscape of time.[1]

Erasing the past can be a strategy of power, allowing dominant stories to persist unchallenged. In Aotearoa New Zealand, such dynamics have shaped both the terrain and the narratives told. Ecologist Geoff Park observed of the Hauraki Plains that “the recognisable combination of trees, pasture and human structures makes it seem perhaps as if they are all that was there.”[2] This statement by Park feels deeply personal. Growing up there, I was never told, nor did I ask, what existed before dairy farming. My great-grandparents, Scottish settlers, were focused on creating a life for their family. We celebrated their hard work in clearing the land, and I assumed that what I saw was all that had ever been. Unknowingly, I had also lived near the Kopuatai Peat Dome, the largest unaltered raised bog in Aotearoa, and a living archive of what came before.[3] It is not a ruin as such, though in the late 1800s, it was likely viewed as one - wasteland to be improved.

Making choices that honour the integrity of entire ecological systems, not just human needs, and resisting decisions driven by economic logic is at the heart of my practice. In the case of the Piako Swamp, that includes Māori communities, rivers, birds, trees, eels, fish, and the soil’s vibrant web of life.

Traditional European pastoral painting often presented cultivated landscapes as harmonious, reinforcing the idea of human intervention as progress. Early works by artists who accompanied James Cook, and New Zealand Company painters like Charles Heaphy, promoted visions of Aotearoa as flat, cleared, and ready for settlement - landscapes conspicuously emptied of people.

There’s tension in trying to capture the Hauraki Plains as they appear now. The green fields, trees, and rivers present a romantic illusion that masks the destruction that enabled it to be made. Alternatively, reimagining the rich kahikatea forest risks its own idealisation. The work sits within this tension, asking: how do I depict ecological loss, of ancient forests, birds, eels, and mahinga kai, and Māori displacement? How do I hold this alongside my Pākehā family’s story, who arrived seeking a better life, unwittingly contributing to that transformation?

I began with a loaded form of painting, watercolour on paper, echoing colonial botanical and topographical traditions, and through the development of the practice have increasingly made material and conceptual connections to water within this swamp. I highlight water as an active agent, embracing effects like blooming and puddling to evoke seepage, contamination, and collapse. By incorporating water and mud collected from Piako Swamp sites, often chemically compromised, these paintings will remain archivally unstable, resisting permanence.

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The river tells its story, river mud and water on paper

Winning 90,000 acres from sea and swamp, river mud and watercolour on paper

A digger type dredge working on the Hauraki Plains, river mud and watercolour on paper

A muddy land, river mud and water on paper

A wonder-waking project, river mud and watercolour on paper

A romance of modern times, river mud and watercolour on paper