Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, New Zealand
A ‘Dash of Home’ participates in the settler-colonial practices of seeing Indigenous land through European image-making practices. Drawing from historical colonial images of Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington in Aotearoa New Zealand, the film disrupts the English settler’s drive to see a ‘dash from Home’ in colonial images. The film co-opts colonial image-making strategies by introducing more-than-representational materials into the space of drawing. A ‘Dash of Home’ offers a critical engagement with colonial imagery that gives historical images immediacy, emphasising the material impact of historical representations on the past, present and future.
A ‘Dash of Home’ participates in the settler-colonial practice of contemplating Indigenous land as European landscape. Lifted from the publication English Reaction to the New Zealand Landscape, the phrase ‘dash from Home’ describes the strategy of portraying Aotearoa New Zealand, through the landscape preferences of future setters. A ‘Dash of Home’ foregrounds the collective and iterative processes in which colonial images are made. Botanical illustrations from James Cook’s first voyage, town plans and ‘on the spot’ views of Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, produced by the New Zealand Company, were drawn and re-drawn, passing through different hands, changing mediums, and travelling between different lands. Each re-drawing presented the physical aspects of the land but, more significantly, heightened the drawings’ affective qualities, becoming a vehicle for ongoing colonisation. This film seeks ways of altering the ‘dash of home’ mentality through simple and literal moves of adding and extracting materiality within the fictional space of the drawing. A ‘Dash of Home’ continues the tradition of adding the familiar to an unknowable land but equally explores what conceptions of home must first efface before contemplation can take place.
"After making the film, I began to reflect on the commonalities between the different representations shown in the work: botany, town plans and landscape scenes. This led to the eighteenth and nineteenth-century practice of scientific illustration called ‘truth-to-nature.’ Scientists and artists collaborated to represent the typical or ideal seen in nature. In the context of my work, truth-to-nature provided a linking mechanism between botany and the more expansive geographical projections, such as landscape plans and perspectives. I began to interpret my work as co-opting or extending truth-to-nature to a broader range of colonial representations. My approach and understanding of ‘truth’ are reimagined in this work. ‘Truth’ in truth-to-nature is not what was physically seen but a kind of contemplative sight. A sight that is distanced from the existing world, allowing new, usually detrimental, ways of seeing. In my work, the idea of ‘truth’ is still emerging. One interpretation is that truth is found in revisiting a specific location’s past and showing that its historical representations have real material effects while offering a mode of inquiry for countering a singular future. Films’ duration, movement and sound offer vitality and immersive affects to our interaction with historical images. For this project, film is a medium that makes the images feel immediate. Film, as opposed to still images, also offered a way to show my participation with the images through time, not fixed in time, as with the source images. One challenge of this project was finding nuance to the tactic of staging colonial image-making strategies while simultaneously countering them."