Bowen Galleries, Wellington 3 - 31 December 2012
I moved to Avondale when we bought our first
house two and a half years ago. In doing so I left the community I’d lived in
for twelve years, since returning to New Zealand after a similar time living in
London. I was displaced by the move, and through it became psychologically
connected to the many who have been exiled to alien communities by inner city
house prices. In an effort to tie myself to the area I researched local
history. Avondale’s past is fascinating. Until 5 June 1882 it was called Te
Whau, which is the name, of Māori origin, for Entelea arborescens, a native tree.
The old name endures in the Whau River,
which is an estuarial branch of the Waitemata Harbour, that runs into a creek
that cuts through New Lynn to Green Bay – a Godwit flight path and once one of
two major Auckland Portages. Avondale gained its first European settler in
1843, who was joined by several more in the 1850s with the completion of the
Great North Road. It is the home of the introduced Australian Huntsman spider (now
commonly known as the Avondale spider). The district had many market gardens
and was the site of the development of the Hayward variety of kiwifruit.
There are attributes of contemporary Avondale that
don’t fit into this grand narrative. These smaller histories are only observed
on the ground through physically being here and seeking a sense of place. The
development that has taken place in the area in the past few years, largely
unregulated, has covered over prime market garden land with a mix of industrial
building and poor housing, jarring a sense of urban design. The street I live on
is in a completely flat part of Avondale and there are few trees. I found
myself looking up a lot, askance from the cacophony of substandard infill
housing and lack of greenery and care. It
was through this daily gesture that the seed of this project began.
Of the few trees that do exist in Avondale, many are
Camellias. The story of how they came to feature so abundantly I do not know.
But I can say they are incongruous with the housing aesthetic. I became fixated
with the landscape created by the Camellia trees. Looming above the built
environment, these features took on the characteristics of mountains – where
there are none. I began to take
ritualised walks to document these ‘mountains’. After weeks of going through
this process every other day, a parallel observation began to take shape, which
was the bizarre juxtaposition of each Camellia bush with its associated building.
To document this aspect of the urban environment, and
at the same time create an aesthetic value that I could live with, I began a
database of house colours and associated Camellia flower colours. Each property with a Camellia was redesigned as a
gradient map and in doing so the urban design, or lack of, was remedied. The
set I have selected for the project at Bowen Galleries is a sample of all of
the houses with Camellias from one street in Avondale, which is the street I
live on – one of the streets with possibly the worst housing in this area. The
entry to the street has one of the best Camellia Mountains that I documented.
By the time this exhibition closes I will have left
Avondale. Through some fluke of the munificence of angels, we have managed to
purchase a home back in the community we left two and a half years ago. This,
then, has become a loving, and fitting, parting gesture.