A moment in (deep) time, Text by Nina Dyer
The exhibition ONEPŨ shifting sands/shifting time takes one half of its dual title from the Te Reo Māorikupu (word) for sand, or sandy, though other translations consider onepū to mean loose sands or sandy soils (1). Anyone who has pulled weeds from such soils, or has otherwise tried to set down roots in them, will be familiar with the lack of resistance, the defiant slipperiness that characterises earth packed with the granular substance.
At Sunset Beach, the locus of Port Waikato’s beach-side town, diggers have been employed to combat the effects of coastal erosion; smooth blankets of sand are pushed back up into the dunes, forming uncanny mounds. Someone has squared off a temporary pile of rubble to one side: a hint at the sisyphean task of containing rocky sediment deposited along the shore after each high swell. Here, on the periphery of the land, residents are keenly attuned to the vulnerabilities of their shoreline–that is, the coast’s alarming and incremental dissolution into the sea.
Aware of the temptation to adopt a fatalistic attitude towards ecological collapse, the artists of the mothermother collective instead held intimate wānanga at the Port, for fossicking, planting kōwhangatara (spinifex) and pīngao (golden sand sedge), and respectful, active observation. Amongst their findings, artist Michelle Mayn observed the female reproductive method of kōwhangatara—its inflorescence or flowering system—in the detachment of spindly, pointed seed heads from the plant body. Disarticulated from their stems, an abundance of the self-seeding inflorescence accumulated at the feet of the artist. Mayn found that once the protective spikes fall away, an iridescent, petal-like bract remains at the base of each seed. Attuned to the resilience of systems which remain fragile in appearance, Mayn interlaced a series of the delicate spinifex bracts using Māori weaving techniques: processing muka (2).
Driving through Port Waikato on a dry February afternoon, the kind where cicadas reach a crescendo and reflected white light catches your retina. Dad notes how the dune systems have been eroding since before The Storm. Two years on, we still refer to Category 3 Severe Tropical Cyclone Gabrielle with various epithets (The Cyclone, The Big One). Since Gabrielle, the occurrence of extreme weather events is projected to become more frequent in this part of the world, and I wonder when we’ll have to begin identifying such events by their designated names again. How long until The Storm becomes just one of many, occurring within tighter intervals?
A resident of Port Waikato, painter Jana Wood left Tāmaki Makaurau to reside in a place where the atmosphere can be felt more intensely; negative ions course over the dunes, transporting the rhythms of sand, water and air inland. For her series of paintings developed out of the wānanga, Wood shifted her gaze from the qualities of the Port’s light and air–elements foregrounded in her recent practice–towards what lay beneath: “Looking down rather than out … the energy is more of a slumping, a gravity, and there is a downward flow and heaviness to the works”. The paintings are an ode to the drama and monumentality of the shifting dune systems, concentrated images which capture a feeling of being subsumed within something greater, something uncontrollable. By working through highly laboured techniques–layers of gesso and egg tempera made from scratch, mixed with natural pigment–Wood approached the paintings as events, parts of a life cycle, relinquishing the desire to capture or make still natural phenomena.
“Michelle, I think the harakeke seed pods are ready. Some have already dried up and blown away. Early this year, as it’s been very dry and windy here apparently”. Just days after this exchange between Jana Wood and Michelle Mayn, a large blaze crept up through a hillside of toetoe in Port Waikato, its legacy a shock of scorched and blackened grass, tī kōuka trunks standing half-naked, Finely woven cloaks, and charred against the razed ground.
Summer bushfires are not uncommon along the West Coast of Te Ika-a-Maui. Two weeks after the first fire was reported in the artists’ group chat, another had already broken out.
Sculptor Melanie Ross gathers materials through chance encounters–objects that have suffered a loss of integrity, often through processes that eclipse their internal logic. From where they were half-buried in the dunes, Ross located hefty fragments of the Surf Club’s car park, which suffered significant erosion in July 2024. To make something concrete, to cement an idea: these everyday metaphors take for granted the changeability of matter, its dissoluble boundaries.
Excavating these unwieldy fragments involved permissions from the surf club, the support of strangers, and heavy machinery operated by locals, transforming the artist’s personal response into a communal, relational act. While Ross perceives an innate value in the asphalt pieces—despite their original function and qualities having been undermined, eroded both figuratively and literally—others involved in their salvation viewed them as mere signs of loss, if not entirely valueless. With each handling, the edges of the fragments crumbled further; a quiet insistence that matter has a will of its own.
Equally drawn to what transpires when control is surrendered to the elements, Nat Tozer placed three stretched canvases within the dunes of the Port. Exposed to the intricate network of roots and shifting soils, the canvases deformed and reformed, creating an unmediated record of the underground. This process acquainted Tozer with the undergrowth, the unknown, through embodied observation. In bypassing conventional Western knowledge systems–data collection, laboratory analysis–Tozer instead fosters an open-ended and subjective exchange of material qualities, their mauri, or life-force.
The burnt terrain of Port Waikato’s recent fire calls to mind the devastating footage of landslides at Muriwai, where the hills gave way under the pressure of Gabrielle’s stormwaters. Beneath fragile human-built defences lie vast root systems and dense mineral layers, sifted and compacted by the elements–landforms and outcrops shaped over millennia of compression, eruption and accretion. Yet for all its apparent solidity, land ultimately yields to water; a storm surge or four months’ worth of rainfall in one night are all it takes to alter the shape of the land for generations–such is the prerogative of geological temperament.
Soils hardened into fixed, grassy ridgelines have split off dramatically along Sunset Beach. Amongst the cascades of sand and flaccid grasses, now relaxed into a temporary margin, Inga Fillary located personal items lost to the elements: “items of human dross”.
The mundane, weathered forms take on new potential within the gallery space, now cast into sculptural objects using compost. Despite their rich, sooty appearance which brings to mind the after-image of recent bushfires, each item becomes a symbol of the regrowth that can be found in even decimated environments. Collaborating with native plants such as Muehlenbeckia Axellaris, Fillary sought a visual expression for “bleak optimism”: a term Dr Norah Campbell uses to describe the potential for unprecedented, ethical relations precipitated by the climate crisis.
For ONEPŪ shifting sands / shifting time, Port Waikato artist Margaret Feeney has worked card and paper into allusive geometric forms. With anthropomorphic qualities and vertical stripes that mirror the sand’s pull towards the sea–“taking the plants and small animals with it”–the works employ dark humour as a reflective strategy. The titular Danse Macabre references the medieval artistic genre, heavy with religious subtext, that warned congregations of the transcience of earthly attachments. Part of a major sand system which connects Cape Reinga to Taranaki, the Port’s coastal banks are subject to unpredictable “slugs” or pulses of sediment. A system which operates of its own accord, the land’s slow but willful retreat into the sea enacts a dance with death for the organisms within, insignificant in the schema of deep geological time.
A 30 minute drive from Sunset Beach, the powerful waterfall Te Wai Heke O Maoa (Vivian Falls) is tucked between rolling farmland and dirt road, shaded by a patch of native vegetation. Its spectacular waters cascade over a rock face that dips away immediately below the crest, like water overflowing a bath or cows’ trough. The falls take their name from Maoa, a rebellion leader who, in the 1700s, set out inland from Te Akau to Taupiri seeking utu (retribution)against a tyrannical rangatira. To test his warriors’ strength and loyalty before battle, he reportedly ordered them to dam the fast-flowing stream. Maoa then commanded them to lay on the empty riverbed below, where they would face the full force of the unleashed waters. All of the men prevailed through this harsh military drill, and the subsequent rebellion was a success.4
Watching the unrelenting force of the flowing waters as they spill over that crest, I think of the root systems hard at work in the dunes–holding fast beneath compact sands, their loyalty to the land tested each time a high tide swells.
References
1. The translations sand/sandy are sourced from Te Aka Māori Dictionary, while loose, sandy soils is the recorded definition of Onepū, the placename, according to Manatū Taonga, Ministry for Culture and Heritage.
2 The fine strands of fibre made by processing the flesh within harakeke and wharariki leaves. dyes from wharariki and harakeke seeds; and whatu, the twining technique seen in woven kākahu.
Poetry, by Jana Wood
“Gestures, the land speaks” reading for Wallace Gallery Exhibition
A wild cacophony of hues, some are fugitives from other places, violet, magenta, cadmium,
they seem happy here, in the heat, with nativity, states of flow, communion, belonging
the hawks swoop their prey over blustery dunes
swirling, lashing, the air thick with heavy metal, precious metal that man swoops on, 2.5 million years past
the sea continues to encroach, diminishing precious sand
views wrapped, framed, treasured by our gaze, poetic arrangements of idealised beauty, pruned of all fault
they’re nourishment for our soul, both wild and controlled, double-bind
Looking backwards, wilderness was a long process, resilient beyond our imagination
70 million years of isolation
I stand looking, nothing on the horizon, everything on the horizon
light and heat, rising water, precious eco-systems, some still thrive, hau, moana, awa a whenua
Circular time, collective consciousness, which direction are we facing?
“Recreation Reserve”
Land lost, immanent collapse
the ground where we stood lost to sea and storm
ripping it apart, a story of disappearance.
But weren’t the sounds safely distant?
“Facing the Awa“
for Mothermother “Table” booth,
at the Aotearoa Artfair
A trade-me find, from a Waikato farming family,
I received this table with details of the origins
of it’s craftmanship, but who knows which
forest it thrived in, before arriving here?
The table supports me every day, as I sit
facing the tupuna awa, the river ancestor,
my elbows and forearms and sometimes
my forehead, rests on this rimu.
The mighty Waikato, the ever present body
that runs through, dividing East from West,
I can’t see her from here, but I can feel her
mauri, feel her evolution from that wet bubble
underground in the far South.
She gathered forces, channelled energy,
and meandered, then gushed then
meandered again into a floating rhythm.
Through virgin rainforest, in days long past,
she made it here, to the Port, Te Puaha Õ
Waikato, to be sucked out into the Moana, the
Tasman Sea, Te Tai-o-Re -hua and into the Pacific,
Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, that liquid continent
known by our ancestors.
They both support us, the awa te moana,
they mix with other ocean currents and swells
to become the ones that support life on earth.
Jana Wood 