Channels: Crystallising Universe

2016

9-24 September 2016

123 Commerce Street, Frankton, Hamilton

Motion of a Particle World, spoken text, 9mins 53sec

2016.09.09 - 2016.09.29

For the installation Crystallising Universe (an iteration of the Channels project), experiences in and around the space were recorded for a week before the installation was open to the public. These experiences feed back into the work, predominantly through a spoken text titled Motion of a Particle World, 2016. The movement of winter light; rain coming in through the leaky windows of the building (the floor had to be mopped twice daily); the foreclosed department store Forlongs poetically positioned across the street and slightly concealed by the thick branch of a large tree so that it almost read forlorn; the disorder of the gallery's storeroom-come-office; all became entangled in the experience of the work.

A key interest for the Channels project is the industrial ceramics waste at Brickbat Bay and Limeburners Bay, in Hobsonville Point, Auckland. The project consists of a series of artworks that draw on the ecological, poetic, and historical contexts of these spaces. Other sites and spaces of research have been inculcated into the Channels archive as it develops horizontally and vertically.

Entanglements describe a system or network of co-dependency, where things are not possible in autonomy. The industrial pollution at the Hobsonville site is entangled to the historical figure Rice Owen Clark, whose factory was responsible for many of the drainage pipes used in Auckland between the 1860s and 1929, when the factory closed. Clark's potteries, later forming Amalgamated Brick and Pipe and the well-known Crown Lynn, left Hobsonville after the clay ran out.¹ Since then, the ceramic remains of the factory have grown barnacles, been smoothed and twisted by the tide, and provided refuge for mangroves returning to the area. Being entangled opens up potentialities, yet in the same breath it entraps us further into cycles of dependency.² Entanglement promotes a textual expression of the world and experience beyond representation.³ Clark's grave reads "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee."⁴

1. See Dick Scott, Fire on the Clay: The Pakeha Comes to West Auckland (Auckland: Southern Cross, 1979).

2. Hodder, Studies in Human-Thing Entanglement, 9.

3. ibid.

4. See an image of R. O. Clark's grave here: