The land is slowly liquid – 2010
landart – Auckland botanical gardens
I started thinking of the land as a slow liquid many years ago when I was fencing in the Coromandel hill country …. there were a number of old fences … agricultural archives in themselves, probably built around the thirties … before standardized fencing materials were commonly available … The strainer posts -long heavy posts at either end of the fence were of Puriri … branches mostly over 400 mm dia deeply buried in the earth …this hardwood timber was chosen because of its resistance to rot. The posts were of Totara … chosen because of relative resistance to rot and because it split well into the lighter posts … where the fences had been built across a steepish slope the land subsidance over the intervening years had carried the fence into long graceful arcs between the strainers which were buried deeply enough to have remained stationary … like great sein nets… in many places the surface earth had moved over two metres … not as catastrophic erosion but as gradual slow slumping … In another instance a telegraph pole placed on a hillside had been carried downhill at the base and held at the top by the wires to a stage where it was sitting at about 45 degrees from the vertical … in some cases swampy earth could be seen to be almost cascading slowly over the steeper drops with great striated rents in the turf…
This work was formed in the shape of a great curling breaker .. initially with a digger and then with rakes …