Rearranging the Furniture

Chair. Waitui. 2011.

I grew up in the fine village of Paekākāriki, eldest child of two hippie parents, with no money but plenty of cool. When I was little, our house was a modest century-old cottage. Throughout the years of my childhood my clever builder-father dug down into the great big sand dune that the house sat on, and then out towards the hill, and the next door neighbours on both sides, and up one layer and then two…and in the end, that very small dilapidated cottage became a castle, complete with turrets and a bridge. It still has bits that are waiting to be finished, but from the outside, it looks like mum and dad have really arrived at a place of grandiose, and somewhat ageless comfort. Of course, when I was small, the castle was yet to be realised, and our life was free from the burden of excessive luxury. I vividly remember that on some days I would arrive home from school, and my mum would have moved all of the furniture around - particularly in the dining room and lounge, but potentially in the bedrooms as well. This post-shuffle reality made it feel like our possessions were more beautiful, because her rearranging would present different vantage points, and new vignettes of items, colours and textures. Parts of each room were repurposed, and our movement through the house would be altered. Sometimes those changes were seasonal - to take advantage of the woodburner in winter, and the western sunshine when the warmer months arrived. Sometimes things were moved just on a whim - an expression of mum’s creativity and resourcefulness. Mum curated our home in a way that overcame our humble means, and what’s more, every time she did it (no matter where things moved to) the space felt much bigger. I don’t know what was going on psychologically, that we all uinversally thought each change was better and more roomy than the previous one, but it was something we all felt. I think that’s maybe a good metaphor for the way I approach change.

I have come to understand that, among certain other traits that likely make me rather stick-in-the-mud about some things, I have inherited a malleable problem solving, innovation-friendly character from both of my parents. Dad’s inventiveness when he needs to make a complicated thing work is an inherently useful quality when applied to photography projects with complicated lighting or staging. Mum’s ability to make the ordinary objects of our life transform into balance and beauty is something I attempt to emulate in much of the work I make. I think the things she harnessed, with her shifting of things-in-space, were both appreciation and gratitude that married with liberal imagination. I remember that from quite a young age, I began rethinking the way the bedroom I shared with my sister Joelle could be, and then when I was a little older and had a room of my own, that periodically I would ape what mum did. I’d change where the bed was positioned, find a new way to stack art supplies, cds, display nicknacks, make it all tidy and logical. I have done the same thing ever since I became a mum myself - moving our own furniture to fulfil the dual purpose of a darned good clean-out, and a new perspective on the world. Sometimes I’ll put furniture in front of a door or window that isn’t in general use, because the payoff could be greater than having access in those ways. Whenever I do this, we all fall in love with our ordinary little house all over again.

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. Studying in the last three years has been a little like that. I came in to Massey’s photography programme with all of my well practised understanding about how to make images exactly the way I intend them to be. Three years later, a Master of Fine Arts under my belt, and the main thing I can say happened to me was that I learned to embrace uncertainty, to lean towards the unfamiliar.

One of the things that happens after you conduct a radical rearrange of your life, is you have to sit in the newness of it and figure out what is possible now that the view is different. I’ve been extremely busy since I finished my study, just hustling a little to get back to financial wellness, and learning to juggle all of the volunteer roles we seem to have inherited, alongside the client work and the theoretical artmaking. It’s quite hard not to feel like I’m abandoning my art practice for too long. Even though the ideas and the simple yearning are still washing through me on the daily, I’m not energetic enough to work in the middle of the night, which is the only uncontested time that is left to me for creating. So, from this vantage point, I am actively appreciating what’s already there. This image above is one I took when my eldest son Antonino was only about two years old. I was making a spontaneous documentation of Grandma’s house at Waitui. By that stage, Grandpa had passed away maybe three years prior, and I was feeling vulnerably nostalgic about the place of my childhood holiday memory. I took pictures with no purpose, which is probably the best way to create liberally. And I tucked those images away in my archive, not sure if I’d ever look at them again. Nearly 15 years later, and three of the pictures shot that day have now made it onto our living room wall amongst an assortment of other work I made in during the Masters, and they belong as much as those newer and more experimental works.

The living room wall, painted a colour, called (somewhat incredibly) ‘Stromboli’, which is also where my mother’s family hail from. I obviously didn’t take this picture especially for showing you our fancy designer space - we don’t usually live with that many cushions filling the couch, but they happened to be dumped there that day. And the dust in and on everything is, unfortunately, quite standard for us.

Now, I’m mostly looking for fun with creations that are absolutely new. But ‘new’ takes a lot of energy and time, and I don’t always have capacity. This ‘old’ work has found new life, by virtue of being appreciated in a fresh context. It’s not all that often that I actually even like something I made that many years ago. Like many creatives, I evolve constantly, and as soon as I’ve moved on, I’m privately disparaging about the things I did that led to the status quo. The set of images I made back in 2011 at the Moleta homestead don’t do that to me though. I think maybe that’s because they’re really quite truthful. I didn’t alter the spaces I photographed to make them better, I was simply appreciating the vignettes that ignited the most memory for me. If you’re curious, the rest of the set are in this gallery here.

This turned into quite an essay. I guess what I’m ruminating on is how to make the best of what I have, and to really appreciate having this reshuffle of priorities and opportunities. I’m extremely lucky that my husband endorses whatever I’m rearranging next. (He even let me pick that paint colour, which was a risk that we think paid off in a lovely, fresh way.) The point of all of this is that keeping things the same is, I think, more of a risk - to happiness, creativity, satisfaction and growth.

Here’s to the lovely things we inherit from our parents - whether by nature or nurture. I’m pretty glad I’ve got the ‘rearrange the furniture’ gene. It might be time for a bit of interior finessing.