photobook

One of my mangrove photographs was included in the photobook ‘whispering bird song’ published by Women In Photography NZ + AU and The Handmade Darkroom. The book itself was handmade, printed, guillotined, collated, and stapled by volunteers in Wellington.

My writing and art practice endeavours to situate my personal experience within the wider ecological field, making a record of change in the body and in the ecological framework the body lives within. I fish selectively and sustainably above water and free dive below. Water and the borderlands between water and land are central to my practice (and life). Water is life-giving and also balm to trauma stored in the body.

These photographs were taken when my partner and I went floundering in Sandspit and Whangateau a month after my second miscarriage. The pain of the second miscarriage made me animal — it was brutal but enriching and I was still reeling from the impact of it. Walking like a stilted bird through the shallows, water up to my shins, I felt animal, but not from pain. I stood in the water like a tall bird, peering in. The ebb and flow of the mangroves soothed the hormones still ebbing from my body and the loss of the small failed body. I captured the magenta-hued world as night fell and I too felt magenta-hued, warmed by my very aliveness.

These photographs are an effort to capture the intricacies and intersections of miscarriage, subsistence living, and the coastal front lines of our changing environment and ecosystems. Our bodies are our greatest vulnerability and our greatest strength. The world works on us as we work on it. Our bodies and our ecosystems are fragile and robust, requiring an approach moving forward that is tender and alert.