SURface responds to finding myself in the damaged but recovering urban landscape of Christchurch, New Zealand between November 2018 and May 2019.

Eight years after the devastating earthquake, I walked the city. Under the open sky, in the strong light, I took short cuts across temporary car parks, cutting corners, reducing distances. I noticed the surfaces, disturbed by the coming and going of car tyres. Entrances leading off the pavement, going nowhere; an empty space for a door mat. Lines that suggest rooms and, sometimes, pipes, twisted and broken near the surface, continuing their empty, wasted journeys underneath. All-day parking on interim surfaces of river stones, rounded and worn smooth over centuries. 

Watch the video here

And then, in March 2019, came the mosque shootings, worlds crashing into each other. Everyone felt the lightning flashes of fear at the depths of human cruelty revealed, and, following immediately, the immense kindness of people, the rolling of grief across days.

A series of intense photographs of the surfaces of Christchurch pavements and temporary car parks on the site of destroyed buildings, made beautiful by rain, sharp-shadowed in evening light, becomes a video, with original music by the Berlin-based film scholar and musician, Eileen Rositzka.

I created a series of monotype prints, pressed by hand. The black and white prints, with their lines, cracks and fractures, make use of natural materials, including dry grasses, flax string, soil, and pebbles taken from the Waimakariri river bed to surface the temporary car parks. They speak of people’s continuing hauntings, in abstract images suggesting loss and resilience, of the disrupted landscape now being rebuilt, and of fragmentation and continuity.