In the summer of 2024/2025 I worked as the assistant coordinator for Te Kohuroa Rewilding Initiative’s Pilot Kelp Restoration Programme at Matheson Bay in Leigh. You can read more about TKRI’s work at their website www.tekohuroarewilding.org.

Photo credit @benthics.

In March 2025, I exhibited alongside 35 other female photographers in the group exhibition In(visible) put on by Women’s Work at the Tuesday Club in Auckland, Aotearoa.

You can see the list of exhibitors and their work and read more about the exhibition on the Women’s Work website.

Exposed kelp bed, Te Kohuroa Matheson Bay, 2025

A kelp bed sits exposed at low tide near the island at Te Kohuroa, its holdfasts, stipes, blades and bladders glint mustard-yellow in the evening sun. The falling tide pulls all the way out, turns, pours languidly back over the kelp’s yielding tendrils. 

Artist Statement for Women’s Work 2025 In(visible) 

This photograph was taken opposite the island at Te Kohuroa Matheson Bay, currently the site of community-led conservation run by the Te Kohuroa Rewilding Initiative, working towards kelp restoration by removing an overabundance of kina. 

Working within their female-led team, I can’t help but draw parallels between conservation and caretaking. Much of our labour, underwater or behind the scenes, is invisible, just as a clean home obscures the hours of work that go into keeping it that way. Arrowing down towards the seafloor to gather an armload of kina, I wonder how this work will be quantified at the surface. 

This photograph peers through the ocean’s mirrored edge, to frame this ever-changing space at the intersection of observation and ecological dynamism, of women’s work and the caretaking of our ecosystems. This photograph aims to make our labours of caretaking visible.

Behind the Work

I captured this photograph in the winter of 2024. The following spring, the Te Kohuroa Rewilding Initiative hired me as their assistant project coordinator to help deliver their summer pilot kelp reforestation programme at Te Kohuroa. 

When the photography collective Women’s Work put out a call for submissions with the theme of (In)visible, I returned to the photographs of the exposed bed of kelp soaked in evening light. When I took this photograph, my body had not long undergone duress and loss, and the tide’s unending flowing in and ebbing out was soothing. The golden tones of the evening had lent the photograph a hopeful mood—and perhaps my body too—that matched the hope I felt as I dove down to the seafloor to gather kina. The sea and my body are greatly linked and after those losses I entered a covenant of caretaking with my body, at the same time I as I entered a covenant of caretaking with Te Kohuroa’s budding kelp. As I worked underwater, the concept behind the images I’d shot that winter began to coalesce. I chose the most impactful images, refined the concept and made my submission. 

A version of this piece was published on TKRI’s website as the featured story ‘Stipes, Blades and Bladders’.

I centred my artist statement around the idea of caretaking as a polite cover for speaking about miscarriage. I haven’t worked out how to speak directly about loss in these spaces (art and conservation) because it isn’t necessarily about loss, and certainly isn’t about these specific losses from my specific body, or not only about them, but about losses of all kinds, in all bodies, of all bodies, and in the larger planetary body.