Contemporary art is the happy stomping ground of the anomaly, the improbable, and the paradoxical - a few examples: Reuben Paterson’s glitter paintings, the international crocheted coral reef project (CCR) and Michael Parakowhai’s cast bull atop a bronze grand piano. Objects and materials that seem to have no business together are combined and when it works, you have that ‘why didn’t I think of that’ moment. Art’s weird hybrids and mutations can also pass on insights about the world and send a jolt through your predictable day.
Perhaps it’s a gentle kind of jolt that Caroline McQuarrie delivers in ‘No Town’, but it’s a jolt none-the-less, as she combines photography of abandoned West Coast mining communities with hand stitched embroidery of maps, and compiled statistics of the ‘boom and bust’ towns. For me, her brain wave is the embroidery and especially her reproduction of the front page of the Brighton Times of 1867, complete with column grids and antique fonts.
Caroline, who works at Massey University’s photography department, says she wanted to reconnect with the West Coast, after 20 years away. She was looking for a new project and on holiday in her hometown of Greymouth became fascinated with the abandoned gold mining towns between Karamea and Hokitika.
“It was an [abandoned] swimming pool in Waiuta that hooked me. I suddenly imagined the life there, the pool on the other side of town from the mine and the children running down there to swim,” she says.
Her photographs record traces of the once vibrant hubs that existed for a matter of decades years then dissipated – they are about community and communities lost, she says. She was helped in her research by local museum staff and a handful of people still living in the towns, who pointed out that these places were often well served with public swimming pools, billiard saloons, whippet tracks and tennis courts. Few records remain of towns like No Town, Greenstone and Brighton, so Caroline filled in the gaps imaginatively.
She works across a variety of media, and has previously stitched directly onto photographs, as well as incorporating video and sound in her work. ‘No Town’ will be shown in Hokitika and Greymouth later this year. It is accompanied by a booklet, and the artist is creating an online archive of images on the same theme called www.thenotownproject.org.
Exhibitions at Aratoi: 'No Town' - Caroline McQuarrie, until 15 June ‘Mana Whenua – Taku Kai, Taku Oranga’ – Bronwyn Waipuka-Callander, until 4 July; Kuia - Kiri Riawai-Couch, until 5 July; 'Sweet Home Sick' – Anita de Soto, until 15 June.
This sampler combines demure cross stitch with furious invective,
as if spat out by an exhausted, mud soaked prospector.