In Tessellations, dynamic cyanotypes, exposed using invasive plant specimens collected from the Te Hāwere-a-Maki Goat Island and Cape Rodney area in the spring and summer of 2025/2026, are presented in tessellated form.

Dynamic or unfixed cyanotypes are not static or preserved but continue to develop and darken over time. Each unstable exposure was scanned within hours of being exposed and converted to a static digital image.

Once scanned and tessellated the digital images are anything but static. Exposures made using a twelve-inch section of banana passionfruit vine or two small branches of eucalyptus convey the original sites, the family of strangling vines and the crowd of towering eucalyptus that characterise the ‘waste areas’ of vegetation lining either side of the steep winding road leading down into the valley. A single blade of seeded prairie grass evokes the open pasture above Cape Rodney’s cliffs and a lone frond of Bracken conjures the fernbrake where the pasture meets the tamped-down coastal walkway.

Botanical wallpaper and its history cannot be divorced from colonial expansion and ‘discovery’, when decorative images of plants and people indigenous to landscapes obtained by violence, served the empire by idealising conquest and boasting of its newly acquired economic assets. A patented innovation in wallpaper production around the same time Aotearoa was formally colonised, allowed the mass production of continuous rolls of machine-printed paper to eclipse the labour-intensive production of hand-printed cotton rag tiles.

These exposures and tessellations are sideways captures of the unseen and ethereal essence of these sites and geopolitical snapshots of this particular place at this particular time. I’ve worked in collaboration with plants native to Australia, South America, and China, now ‘naturalised’ here in Aotearoa, being myself from North America and ‘naturalised’ here, to produce a portrait of this place where we each live now. These lengths of wallpaper boast of ‘waste’ spaces — road verges, fallow pasture, cliff-sides, and coastal margins — where more-than-human worlds persist and sometimes thrive, despite the limits we imagine for them and impose on them.