Origin Stories
I could write about the white guy with the afro, lead guitarist of The Naked Ape rock band, smoker of weed, builder of houses and culverts and bridges. And his exotic trainee teacher girlfriend, who he wooed with his badass backing skills using the steering knob on his Valiant Wayfarer ute.
Tea and biscuits and pieces of the past
When I was working in the early stages of my Master’s project, I took a collection of voice recordings from a guided conversation between my mum and her sister, about their remembered childhood at Waitai, on D’Urville Island. Something mum said changed the direction of my enquiry, from being specifically about inherited history, to something much more fluid. She said, in reference to the feud that broke the Moleta family into two, ‘Family folklore can warp and change with the telling’. It shook me, for its absolutely liberating truth.
Rearranging the Furniture
What do you do when you have equally warring instincts to conform to peaceful order, and to abandon convention and break the rules? I think that’s actually where photography positions me very comfortably. There’s a faithfully followed method to making a good exposure, placing sharpness, balancing composition. I know how to do those things. But in the same way that mum shakes the tin of her world, and chooses to make the best of where things have landed, sometimes I do too.
The Mutual Admiration Society
Show me the audacious and the new. Some artists work well as hermits, removing connection with normality so that they can bury themselves in a pure kind of making. That’s the Van Gogh cut-your-ear-off kind of artist life that wouldn’t be useful for my family, or actually for my own mental health. Instead, I’m really pretty happy when my work lets me encounter the brilliance of other people, and dwell for a time in their particular passions.
Advance and Retreat
Returning to this idea about work and play. I’m accepting that I might never make any money from my urge to pursue ‘art’, whatever that actually means. In the post-study aftermath, I am piecing together the ways that we can fund our life. One of the main ways I can do that is with my photography, and I have never been more grateful to have this ability to merge my obsession and our need.