News — ANNE MARIE BASQUIN

Publications, Exhibitions, Awards, Updates

Farewell to Goat Island Campground

Published Online

July 2024

Kip and I collaborated on an article to reflect on Goat Island Campground two years after its closure in July 2022. The campground was a special place, not only to me, but to many people around NZ and overseas. Even my brother Bill C remembers staying there when he was traveling here in the late 90’s.

I moved to the camp in July of 2021 as a student in the MCW program at Auckland University (Master of Creative Writing) 90 minutes drive away. Auckland went into an extended lockdown in August until December of 2021. Classes took place over zoom during that time and on into the next year. I attended each zoom class from my car at the marine reserve carpark because the signal there was better than at the camp. I lived at the camp for nine months before it closed and I moved in with Logan.

There is so much that I want to write about Goat Island Campground but this article is a good start. You can read the article here.

Leigh Wharf Cleanup

Volunteer Snorkel crew & Photographer

May 2024

The Leigh Wharf Cleanup, organised by Goat Island Dive & Snorkel, was a huge success. I was privileged to be on the snorkel cleanup crew. There were dozens of snorkel, scuba and land cleanup volunteers. Everyone made a huge effort to clean up the harbour and surrounding bush, bringing lots of enthusiasm and passion for conservation and preservation.

Kip shared photographs I took of the Leigh Wharf Cleanup on the Clearyak blog. You can view them here.

(Clearyak is a clear kayak business that operates at Goat Island Marine Reserve where I worked the summer I first came to Leigh. Kip owns & operates Clearyak. He and I are good buds. We like to bounce creative ideas off each other whenever we have the opportunity.)

Landfall Essay Competition

Awarded Commended for my essay ‘Choosing Sides’

Nov, 2023

Landfall awarded me commended for my essay 'Choosing Sides' in their annual essay competition with roughly 120 entries. I was so pleased by this. They only print the winning essay in the journal, but I have whipped it up into a pretty little pdf.

I am so proud of this essay, of all the work that went into it, all the years of living that went into it. It is only 4000 words and skims over some pretty big happenings, but much more will follow one day in book form.

If you'd like to read it, let me know, and I will send you this very pretty pdf version to read at your leisure.

The Book Exchange

Whangateau

Summer 2023/2024

My art and postcards are now available at the Book Exchange shop in Whangateau! The Book Exchange is run by the beautiful Larissa and open most weekends during the summer. The Book Exchange, the land there in Whangateau, and the recipes for the beautiful body oils Larissa makes and sells have been in her family for generations.

Open Mic Poetry Night

Mangawhai

November 23, 2023

I’ll be reading a poem or two at this open mic in Mangawhai later this month — one about sharks and if there’s time, something from the Too Private for Poetry collection.

Open Studio

Dowling Street Studios, Otepoti

2021

in print

Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue

Issue 21, December 2020

Art & Water Collaboration: Interview

Discussion of the collaboration I undertook with marine scientist Bryce Peebles as part of a group of scientists and artists affiliated with the University of Otago and the Dunedin School of Fine Arts for the Exhibition Art & Water (HD Skinner Annex, Otepoti, 2019).

View interview online here.

View entire issue online here.

In Collaboration

Confined Water Shoot

With Kassandra Lynne Photography

Otepoti, 2020

In Protest

Proposed Landfill Site at Otokia Creek

Otepoti, 2020

Dunedin Otepoti Otokia Anne Marie Basquin Brighton

group Exhibition

Our Oceans

Forrester Gallery, Oamaru

June to July, 2020

In Review

Angela Trolove on the exhibtion Prayers for water

february, 2020

Anne Marie Basquin paints poems in wetwash cursive directly onto her canvas, making the primal layer invite its own colorific fulfillment.

Listen to these names: ‘Being Swept Up in Everything’, ‘Deep Singer’ and ‘What Great Expanses One Inspires’. When the accompanying photographs swim before you the painting titles come into their own; referring to the deep sea, the cobalt swirls.

A fully loaded brush drew ripples. A curve passing into circularity was given over to inertia. The psyche of two works is the kimono blue of the ocean - Edo blue, indigo – and tender rose apricot. Eyes reach out to eyes. Doors do and do not open. One painting whispered interspecie-communication, and then it blinked.

Whale ribbing is chalked across an oversize canvas, and flighty white paint spirals with the energy of jumping light. The phenomena of waves scattering light - that glittering bewitches me. For Anne it’s flash communicated in fine threads of acrylic hooping over the large canvas. It's also captured in her motion-cheating photographs.

I meet eight large photographs. The crispness of the foreground tangles in my eye, photons scatter. A blurred sea throws up an aurora, both beacon and lure. The trillion fish are not coming to us; they’re in their own delving, fleeing, and pursuit.

Treading water and gazing up to a blurred island, a point of view has submerged me. Invited to take on Water’s sensibility, who does Water pray for? Rubbery belly stripes mesmorise. This one-tonne humpback has so small an eye, no larger than any nodule on her beak. Yet the lid may open and close. The scale of our freedoms will interpose.

Few practitioners can bring us so intimate an image of a humpback, an image taken in the first-person and finished on archival paper, soaked to its margin in topaz ink.

I trust this artist because she respects fellow mammals, I think wryly, breastfeeding my infant son.

Whatever practise Anne returns to - be it painting, photography, being in the water, or writing – it’s as though she’s never been away from it. In continually exploring she enjoys a transdisciplinary approach: daring, encountering, and retelling.

This exhibition comes to us from the depths. I swim out of it buoyant, into the myth of above-water.

Angela Trolove

10/02/2020