Listening to a Wet Land

Pah Homestead

November 3- February 12 2023

‘To Locate’ Exhibition text by Matthew Wood

‘To See Obliquely: Kate van der Drift’s Listening to a Wet Land’ by Alena Kavka in CIRCUIT Artist Moving Image

‘Listening to a wet land - review’ by Andrew Clark in Photoforum

Listening to a Wet Land is a research project comprising an essay film and a series of large-scale prints made from camera-less ‘river exposures’. Situated in the fragile waters of the Hauraki Plains, the visual research is primarily field recordings. Both the digital moving image and analogue photographs explore stories of loss, of damage incurred in the politics of land use, as well as stories of hope and the potential for repair through agency of the more-than-human.

I’ve termed the camera-less works ‘river exposures’ because they are exposed to water in the absence of daylight by submerging film in lightproof holders in the Piako awa’s tributaries. Farm run-off and saltwater combine with sediment and bacteria. Algae have grown and bacteria have eaten away at the negative’s emulsion: durational accretion created by the water’s action and reaction with its chemical compounds. The films are placed in the river for 2-4 weeks depending on the season and moon phase, then developed by hand in a darkroom.

The essay film Dazzled (Numbed?) by a Myth is comprised of two sections. The first part is an historical account of the social and ecological transformation in the Hauraki Plains since colonisation revisited through the writing of Pākehā ecologist and historian Geoff Park. In the second part, the narrator reads a letter I wrote to American environmental non-fiction writer Barbara Hurd, exploring some of the conceptual terrain in her book Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination. The essay film was edited during the five-month lockdown of 2021 with footage I collected while making the Hauraki river exposures in 2019 and 2021. The title Dazzled (Numbed?) by a Myth is borrowed from Astrida Neimanis and her expanded question, “How will we, as nature, water and climate contracted, continue to inscribe attunement, listening, partial dissolution, collectivity, care, curiosity, wonder, grace, gratitude or other modes of becoming-with, instead of writing against them, dazzled (numbed?) by a myth of separateness?”

I would like to acknowledge and extend gratitude toward tāngata whenua of the Hauraki Plains, Ngāti Hako, the land and waters where this research is situated, and which I have visited as manuhiri while making work. With a deep respect for Te Ao Māori and its inherent interconnected understanding of the more-than-human world, this research seeks to understand some of Hauraki’s social and ecological system stories, their connections and interdependencies.

1. Neimanis, Astrida. “Nature Represents Itself: Bibliophilia in a Changing Climate.” In What If Culture Was Nature All Along? Edited by Kirby Vicki, 179-98. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Accessed August 26, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g050d1.13

The essay film Dazzled (Numbed?) by a Myth (2022) explores the fragile ecology of the Hauraki Plains through two readings. The first traverses past social and ecological transformation in the Plains. The latter reading grapples with what remains — shifting margins and precarious territories.

Single channel digital video and sound projection. 13.09 minutes, looped

Artist: Kate van der Drift

Narrator: Geva Ngapō Downey (Ngāti Tamaterā, Ngāti Porou)

Dialogue Editor: Jackson Hobbs

Passages used with permission:

Part I

Geoff Park, Ngā Uruora: The Groves of Life

Victoria University Press, 1995.

Part II

Letter to Barbara Hurd, citing her work in

Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination

University of Georgia Press, 2008.

New Moon to New Moon, February 37°17'01.2"S 175°31'02.9"E.

Chromogenic Photographs from 4x5” Negative,

Diptych. 1220x1530mm (total 2440mm wide)

2020

Collection of the Wallace Arts Trust. Unique