Jennifer French has photographed the New Zealand landscape on many occasions. In this series she looks at it, post-colonial, tamed. The pastoral and urban, along with the rural and the wilds of the Auckland west coast. In each there is an odd unsettled nature. In two urban settings, figures range off into the inner scene. There is a sense of longing, of ennui or of a thing almost but not quite contained.
Like all colonised countries, Aotearoa/New Zealand has a complex relationship with land and landscape. The stories told by settlers and the dominating culture often simplify and obscure the way this landscape has been acquired and fashioned.
French looks at these scenes with a wide, scoping view that sets us back from them, less intimate.
Introduction of new species was not just the realm of the English colonisers, but here we are reminded of the complex stories of bees in New Zealand. Native bees were and are common but much smaller and less useful economic units than the introduced species. Thus a system of rearing and collection came with honey bees, which has recently seen more but less wanted introductions. That of American foulbrood, and the almost ubiquitous varroa mite, to the ironic point that these introduced bees cannot survive in the wild without, again, our intervention.
French creates a resonance from her document of bee invasion across to the landscape image which shows a just a glimpse of West coast surf. The post-marked walkway protects a fragile dune system (if walkers keep to it), but imposes its own colonial stamp on an image that would otherwise be devoid of human marking. Applying some detective-work, it appears to be an image taken recently at a renowned surf beach west of Auckland. Carefully devoid of identification, one wonders what there was to hide. Maori habitation and wars happened in this vicinity along with more recent logging of native timbers, and likely ship wrecks. The site is also one of recurring loss of life in recreational swimming and fishing.
This resonance carries across with further elements, where the various colours of the bee-hives are repeated in the evening sky of that same image, and the lighting in the final urban image. Repetition of forms is carried across several of the images too – the twelve rectangular hives reappear in the form of a similar number of lit windows in the Auckland Old Folks Coronation Hall and the grid formed by the fencing in another image.
These repetitions of form and colour are evidence again. Solid forms that play on the mind whether we know the motivation of French or construct our own stories.
Jennifer French is an Auckland based photographer. She has a fascination with time as it operates within and between photographic imagery, and how content can be contained or released in different contexts. She works with both analogue and digital media, and has works in both public and private collections.