The work forms part of an early investigation into how place might be encountered through material evidence, measurement and photographic representation. Material retrieved from the ground is recorded through its geographic coordinates and physical mass, reducing a complex landscape to a location and 53 grams of matter.
Rather than describing Tiwai through a conventional landscape image, the work considers what can and cannot be understood about a place through systems of measurement, classification and representation. Across the wider project, landscape photographs similarly withhold substantial areas of visual information, using absence and incompleteness to question the expectation that photography can provide a complete account of place.
Presented in We're not getting out of here alive OR The Land Show, Blue Oyster Art Project Space, Dunedin, 2012. Curated by Jamie Hanton..
https://blueoyster.org.nz/exhibitions/were-not-getting-out-of-here-alive/