I have been lucky to live for several years with Whirlpool (Oppenheim, Whites Aviation) (2007) by Kate Woods hanging on the wall of my lounge. The work shows crystalline forms creeping across the placid mountains and waters of a Whites Aviation photograph. Occasionally, I’ll stop to look at it and think about the strata of media that Woods meticulously assembles: the actual mountains, the photograph of them, the hand-colouring of the photographic print, Woods’ digital copy of the print, her painted cardboard forms laid onto it, the re- photographing, the digital editing, and the final print. Each layer displaces all those preceding it and distances the physical site.

‘Displace’ is a significant word for Woods’ practice. She is interested in the over-familiarity of forests and mountains and romantic winding paths in hillsides and, in the case of her new works for Sites & Settings, the green foliage of Waitītiko creek, near her house. Woods displaces these sites by the cardboard forms she overlays, the flowers she paints, and the alternate landscapes she inserts into gaps. Every place in her photography and moving image work is caught in a moment of transition, or self-doubt, as leaves ripple and replicate, or jewel-like shapes radiate out of the water. Her images are many places at once and therefore nowhere at all.

The American artist Robert Smithson has been influential on Woods, particularly his ‘non-sites’. These are sculptures made of materials moved into the gallery from the world outside: rocks, sand, building materials. Smithson, in his collected writing, was fond of lists, so, inspired by this and the discussions Woods and I had about Sites & Settings, I have compiled a list of disorienting places—places of nowhereness. As in Woods’ images, these are sites where the physical world is distant.

Here, I am ‘taxiing’. This is the only place where I hear this word. I picture it, with its troubling double ‘i’. Nothing else ‘taxis’. Not even a taxi. I do not know what to do with this verb, so I listen, happily, to the safety announcements and switch my phone to flight mode. When I depart, I look out the window and see the airport (with its queues and rows of perfume and hand dryers) receding: a low bunker, or a crystalline conglomeration of grey metal and glass, with many apertures for entrance and exit. When I arrive, the plane taxis into its allotted parking space and, through the restricted view of the oval window, I see a white man drive up beside the plane in a small cart. He has a large diamond earring in his left ear. I expect this new country to be hot—the tarmac looks black and hot. Is it hot outside? Inside, in the plane, in my numbered seat, the old air circulates, thrums, the temperature is consistent.

Kate Woods once told me a story that went like this: She had spent the whole morning working on her art, moving and editing the painted cardboard triangles and cubes that overlay found photographs of mountains and lakes. She manipulates these on Photoshop; she piles triangles on top of each other, strings them together in a chain, or flattens them out. She takes other images and sneaks them into the gaps—sunsets inside mountains, lakes insides lakes. She had been working on her screen for several hours when, because it was a sunny day, she went outside to hang her washing on the line. She pegged up one sock but accidentally let its pair fall to the ground. Kate looked at the sock on the ground and thought, ‘Ctrl + Z’. Not in the screen, not beside the washing line, not next to an autumnal lake, or cascading river, or a bush-clad bank—Kate Woods was nowhere.

Where are my keys? I just saw them on the bench. No, I saw them on the couch. No, I saw them on the bookshelf. No...wait, where are my keys? Ok, I’ll picture where I was when I last saw them. Where was I? Let me think. I must have used them to come in through the front door and then I walked into the lounge and then I sat down on the couch and then I went into the bedroom and looked out the window and there was the woman from across the road, with the funny haircut, walking her dog, and...then what? Where did I go next? It was only a few moments ago and already I can’t remember. How can that be? I had them in my hand. Now I’m standing here. Yes, now I’m here, next to the fridge. Here in the kitchen. My past self, standing next to me, lost the damn keys. Because they’re not here. They’re not on the bench. They’re not anywhere.

This place is structured by the logic of the contractions. Their regularity prompts boring metaphors: they surge like a wave. And like a wave, they pull me down and inside myself, into a new place, a dark hyper-interior. It’s not subconscious and it’s not an internal monologue (there are very few words here) and it’s not that place between dreams and wakefulness. It’s not the inside of my mind but the inside of my body and I have to go there to withstand the contraction, to draw it in and contain it. Because if I let it out, the pain of it will destroy this bed and these walls and this entire hospital. It will decimate and lay waste to crops and livelihoods.

In the space between contractions I am vaguely aware of gripping someone’s hands and the fluorescent light from the corridor outside, leaking into this dim room. Another contraction is in me and I am so there. So trapped in this horrible wrenched body while I create another body.

Later, they will say, ‘You did so well! You kept breathing. You were so strong! Look what you made!’ But who was that woman, lying there, on the bed, her eyes scrunched? I don’t remember. A stranger. Then, where was I? If I wasn’t there?

I go to the clothing sale because discounts are promised. It is not in the usual shop but in an office block in town; the Facebook event says it’s at number thirty-seven, but there is no number above the double glass doors I arrive at. I push one open anyway, and stand in the foyer and look at the directory of business names on the wall: Harbourside Dentists, Black Cat Graphix, City Sports Physiotherapy. The words are made up of individual white letters stuck to a black felt board, some are missing and others slant at steep angles; the words are drunk.

No one else is around and the foyer is quiet. Am I in the right place? To my left, a melancholic ‘ding’ announces the arrival of the lift. Its door opens to reveal a grey carpeted interior, even the ceiling has carpet. There is no one inside. The lift and I wait together. I do nothing. Am I in the right place? I watch the doors close and hear the lift whirring away from me, sucked up to the top of the building by an invisible requester.

I follow it, taking the stairs, which are also carpeted, but this time in a dingy brown. I slowly climb. The staircase feels as if it is in the absolute centre of the building; an internal organ, or a carpeted artery. There is no sound except the padded tread of my feet on the steps and my breath, growing thicker as I ascend. The walls are white. The lights above fluorescent. I keep going. I try to remember why I am in this office block because there is no evidence of the sale. There are no doors, only the eternal staircase, going up, going up, going on and on to nowhere.

In both Kate Woods’ Sites and Settings and Len Gillman, Sue Jowsey and Andrew Denton’s Time’s Strange Tissue, digital photos are presented in ways that force the viewer to question photography’s status as a reflection of the real. In the forty years since Jean Baudrillard advanced the idea of the image as “pure simulation,”(1) unmoored from any underlying connection to reality, photography’s evidential status has remained largely intact. Despite the software needed to modify and simulate photography becoming more and more accessible and widely understood, the ways photographs are actually used still reflect an instinctual sense that they are traces of the real that can stand in for a missing original. The works discussed here present a valuable opportunity to question the ways that digital photography is held distinct from other forms of digital media, and whether it ought to be seen as part of a continuum of digital experiences.

Kate Woods’ work, as seen in her current exhibition, is intriguing in that it both makes apparent its artificiality and conceals the means of its production. The works are densely constructed, chimeric hybrids, incorporating painted cardboard elements that are photographed and reincorporated into composites of original and found photographic material. The use of polygonal forms evokes retro digital iconography, but their handmade imperfections ground them in the analogue, as does the decision to present the works as large-scale prints, aligning them with the physicality of painting.

This particular body of works are explicitly concerned with how representations of landscape in culture colour firsthand experiences of the natural world. Woods utilises both her own photographs of her local creeks and bush environment and similar historical photographs, asking the viewer to consider the rhetorical and art-historical implications of turning land into landscape. In Wairakei Stream, Smithson/Matta-Clark, Woods invokes the names of both land art practitioner Robert Smithson and “anarchitect” Gordon Matta-Clark. The work shows a group of leaflike polygonal forms superimposed on a hand-coloured photograph of a stream that evokes nineteenth-century representations of the New Zealand landscape as an edenic, uninhabited backdrop to the colonial project. The invocation of Smithson and Matta-Clark is particularly interesting in the context of a discussion about the status of the image, because although their works were deeply concerned with the physicality of landscape and architecture respectively, they were primarily viewed and engaged with as photographs, due to their site-specific nature. In their works, as in New Zealand’s geography viewed from the turn of the century, the real becomes irrevocably entangled with its representation—the land becomes a postcard of itself, while the building or sculpture becomes its own documentation. Woods is clearly interested in the way a photograph of an artwork intersects with and complicates the aura of the original.

In particular, Sun Tunnels, Waitītiko Creek, shows Woods successfully manipulating the viewer’s expectations about the veracity and readability of photography. This work is divided up into three planes: a foreground layer of Woods’ leaflike geometric forms, blurred to appear out of focus; a digital photograph of the titular creek, showing water and vegetation, and behind them, framed by “windows” in the photographic layer, what appears to be a painting of an ocean scene. This complex scheme attacks the integrity of the photographic picture plane from multiple angles, placing the viewer in an uneasy viewing position that whiplashes between surface and depth. This strategy also has the effect of complicating the simplistic assumptions that still collectively govern the way photographs are viewed, in which the camera is equivalent to the photographer’s eye, and the photograph is equivalent to a window on reality. This has, of course, never been entirely the case; in 1968, Marshall McLuhan wrote that “to say that “the camera cannot lie” is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name. (2) However, as Woods points out in these works, when the subjectivity and arbitrariness of the photograph is brought front and center, the result is still unease and confusion; our useful shorthands for viewing and understanding such images are exposed as the crutches they are.

Meanwhile, in Time’s Strange Tissue, Len Gillman’s photographs of Antarctica are manipulated and recontextualised into an exhibition by his collaborators Sue Jowsey and Andrew Denton. Some of these images, particularly those taken with the assistance of drones, are breathtaking, showing the vast scale and emptiness of the continent. The decision to alter some of the images digitally is also interesting, challenging the viewer’s expectations of verisimilitude in a similar way to the works discussed above. However, perhaps the most arresting feature of this project is the decision to display the images in the form of a slide show on an immense television in the foyer of AUT’s WZ building. This viewing environment imparts a passive role onto the audience, the parade of images taking on some of the properties of a video, controlling and directing the gaze along a single path. This in itself is a potentially interesting choice, but the qualities of the screen used also have a dramatic effect on the work, as large pixels become individually visible at medium-to-close distances and there is a noticeable flickering effect, especially during the transitions between images. If this sounds like a complaint, that’s because, in part, it is—the work is difficult to look at and parse, in a way that somewhat undermines its effectiveness. However, I raise this point to underline the amorphous nature of digital works, and the dramatic transformations that may occur in the transition from file to screen, print or projection. Perhaps the best way to view this presentation of the work would be as a passerby, catching fragmentary glimpses as the images blend into the sensory background—and maybe this was the intention.

The title of this exhibition is drawn from Walter Benjamin’s essay on The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and the accompanying material states that the work is concerned with “exploring physical and psychological isolation”(3) in the context of the aura of the original. Benjamin saw the aura of an artwork as arising from its unique coordinates in space and time, an immovable point in reality that cannot be transmitted or reproduced. This idea is essentially mystical in nature, as it assumes some quality that even a perfect replica would not possess. Indeed, he speaks of natural phenomena as having this aura: “If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.”(4) Linking this concept to an exhibition of digital photographs raises some interesting questions, as it is arguable that the aura of a digital object is markedly different to that of a physical one, if it even exists. Digital objects are everywhere and nowhere; their authenticity is irrelevant. This still causes people considerable discomfort, as made evident by the recent interest in non-fungible tokens, which attempt to recreate the aura of the artwork in the online sphere, albeit in a transactional, rather than metaphysical, sense.

What, then, of the aura of Antarctica itself? It surely remains unknowable save to those who, like Len Gillman, have actually been there. Trying to find traces of it in these images would be futile, by definition—but then that is, perhaps, the point. Any loneliness or isolation derived from viewing these works would be not the desperation of a frostbitten explorer, but the despair channeled by Baudrillard when he writes of “the desert of the real,”(5) a sense of being lost amidst a blizzard of self-sustaining, self-replicating simulacra.

POST 2

2005 - 2007

@k_jwoods here for post 2. I work at an intersection of photography and painting, informed by a BFA in painting and learning manual photography / printing at high school. 

In 2005 I saw an image of Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, 1977, in a magazine. De Maria placed a great of number of lightning conductor rods in a large field so in a storm lighting will strike the field many times and in a spectacular way. The work was in a place that is that is far away, difficult to get to and only a small amount of people can visit at a time.

I started to think about the way an artwork such as this was recorded in a photograph - so different from the actual artwork which only exists each time for a few moments and then disappears. I became fascinated by the idea of how Land Art had been documented with photography.

Often the works were temporary (sometimes made of earth, smoke and ice) and either continuously moving, changing with the weather or in some cases only existing for a short space of time. I thought photography was an intriguing way to document these works, as it felt static in comparison. 

I decided to work through these thoughts by reconstructing Land Art works with cardboard models and photographing them against appropriated backgrounds. I am interested in the way landscape has been portrayed in history, especially since the advent of photography. I chose ubiquitous images from op shops, places that were familiar but inaccessible, as they were generally from another time so the space they depicted could no longer be accessed. I worked through different types of landscape genre background ie. industrial, 40s farm documentation, tourism and the sublime.  

These early works used my Dad’s first digital camera. The early years of this series incorporated only a little Photoshop editing with the painted cardboard additions literally attached to found prints then rephotographed.

Ka kite anō au i a koutou,

Kate

POST 3

Ata mārie

@k_jwoods here with Post 3

2008-2010 continued an interest in the documentation of Land Art. I embraced Photoshop’s effects and started working in a collage-like way with digital layers. 

My process is journal writing/drawing to investigate concepts / visual language. I photograph, read and do pencil drawings. I source background images, in the past ubiquitous landscape prints from op shops. These days from online collections, copyright cleared for creative reuse. Recently I have taken my own background photographs. 

I make marquettes from cardboard, hot glue, acrylic and gouache. I photograph and upload to Photoshop. I cutaway pieces of the foreground and move things into place compositionally. I change the initial composition as I go. I’ll add effects, do a final sweep, flatten and print as a digital C-type photograph (analogue style print on light sensitive paper from a digital file).

2008 onwards I continued my interest in Robert Smithson’s (and his artistic collaborator / editor Nancy Holt) writings ie. the concept of non site.  

In 2008, I was introduced to the work of John Stezaker. I enjoyed playing with butting up different appropriated images of a similar genre and the alternate worlds this produced. 

I was thinking about climate change/melting icebergs. Not trying to portray it - but it came through subconsciously. 

I began working in the exhibitions team (as an assistant registrar / technician) at City Gallery Wellington in 2008 and was a Trustee of Enjoy Contemporary Art Space (2009 / 2010). I felt lucky to spend time with other artist’s amazing work and incredible ideas  -  so many influences that I can’t name them all here.

The last 3 images reimagine Dennis Oppenheim’s Whirlpool (Eye of the Storm), 1973. The artist used an aircraft to create a vortex of smoke mimicking a tornado. Dennis Oppenheim once said “most art exists in memory aided by photographs’’. 

Heoi anō tāku mō nāianei

Kate 

POST 4

Kia ora, @k_jwoods here for post 4.

First of two parts, looking at recent series Sites & Settings, exhibited at NorthArt as part of the Auckland Festival of Photography 2021. A project unpicking my relationship with my local Waitītiko creek.

I was interested in how particular artists, over various times and movements within the 20th century, related to their local or imagined natural environments. Artists such as Gordon Matta- Clark, Maureen Launder, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Charles E. Burchfield and Edward Steichen.

My family moved back to Tāmaki Makaurau from Te Whanganui-a-Tara in 2019. We don't have a proper garden, so spent alot of time on this nearby bushwalk in the lockdowns. The Roy Clements Treeway walk is 30 years old. An “urban oasis of regenerating bush “ and the product of a huge amount of community volunteering. 

In Energy Tree, Waitītiko Creek, 2021, I used first-hand photography of my local creek. I wanted to start with the base of the real bush but recreate the site; a bit realistic but not entirely.  As in JG Ballard’s Sci Fi book,  The Crystal World, "Atoms and molecules producing spatial replicas of themselves, substance without mass, in an attempt to increase their foothold upon existence”. A visual cue, as it reminded me of working with Photoshop and resizing. 

This work references Gordon Matta Clark’s Energy Tree 1970s drawings, which I am a huge admirer of. Initially, they were based on his interest and concern around alternate forms of housing and town planning using the living environment (he called them ‘breathing cities'). They are somewhat fantastical, almost like buildings made of trees,  and some of his drawn forms edge on anthropomorphic.

I live in a heavily built up area of townhouses, supported by an unlikely long sliver of bush sandwiched between a school and commercial shopping area. So it felt appropriate to reimagine Waitītiko Creek as a Gordon Matta Clark Energy Tree drawing. I wanted the marquette element to have a sense of anthropomorphism, of trees starting to become a subtle building-like structure.

Image:  Energy Tree, Waitītiko Creek, 2021. Courtesy @bartleycoart

POST 5

Part two - Sites & Settings - Waitītiko creek. 

1. Ultrahydrophobicity, 2021 

Inspired by Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1970s Energy Tree drawings, I wanted to recreate an experience of finding nasturtiums taking hold in places they shouldn’t. I fondly remember backyard nasturtiums as a child but transported to the treeline, where native species grow, they become weed-like. However, their waterproof leaves are interesting. If Matta-Clark’s premise of living cities was real, then ultrahydrophobic waterproof nasturtium leaves would be perfect roofs.

2. Moonlight - Mahināpua Creek, 2021 

The recent Auckland Art Gallery exhibition Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art, was an influence, especially Maureen Launder’s illuminated work Wai o te Marama, 2004 described in the exhibition as ‘‘The night turning towards the revealed world…we see restless movements of life begin”. I was influenced by this, trying to capture the essence of an experience in my local bush.

Another influence was Charles Birchfeld’s 50s/60s paintings - which I find to be like a form of synesthesia - he once described hearing sound in the colours of leaves. The natural as portal to the sublime is a bit overstated but often seen in the found images I use, due to their age / initial purpose so connects with his work. I was interested in his visual language: the environmental signs, patterns and cycles. His use of natural phenomena to create modernist pockets of form and and a visual sense of sound. 

I was also interested in the intersection between painting and photography. Especially Edward Staichen’s important photograph The Pond - Moonlight, 1904. This a Pictorialist photographic work where in the three different versions, visible brush marks can be seen by the painting of light -sensitive gum directly on the print, creating pastel-like tones. In a sense I was trying to recreate this image using my local creek. 

3. Sun Tunnels, Waitītiko Creek, 2021 (Left - install at @bartleycoart 📷 by Cheska Brown)

My re-imagination of Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, 1973-76, set against my local creek.

POST 6

Mōrena,

@k_jwoods here with post 6 

The Water Project

Initiated by @ashburtonartgallery Director Shirin Khosraviani:  exploring “cultural, conceptual and imaginative qualities of the rivers, lakes, wetlands and freshwater systems of Aotearoa”. A dream research trip following Canterbury’s waterways with Bruce Foster, Gregory O’Brien, Jacqui Colley, Phil Dadson, Bing Dawe, Brett Graham, Ross Hemera, Euan Macleod, Jenna Packer, Dani Terrizzi, Elizabeth Thomson and Peter Trevelyan. 

 Six months pregnant, excited to talk to artists, scientists and advocates for wai, I didn’t anticipate the sadness I would feel hearing about its current state and probable future, including the plight of tuna kuwharuwharu (long finned eel) at risk from degradation and damming of braided rivers. Its presence was sited by scientists as being an indicator of awa (river) health. 

What stayed with me was a visit to local iwi at Arowhenua Marae, who spoke about their river in a spiritual way and emphasised its life force. In parts of the South Island I felt awe but unfamiliarity. Visiting this river I felt peace, welcome and warmth.  

I wanted to suggest / imbue a sense of life force of a braided river, wai and the tuna kuwharuwharu. To catch a sense of paused movement.

The background images sourced from Te Papa, an incredible resource, to link the photographs to each river. Waimakariri River uses a painting by Thomas Attwood. Clarence River and Waiau River watercolours by James Crowe Richmond. Copyright cleared and 1800s. It felt appropriate to use art from this era as backgrounds, in terms of linking to colonialism’s impact on current water degradation.

Futurism encapsulated dynamism suggesting energy, power, life force and movement. I was influenced by Gino Severini’s abstracted dancers (flow of energy) from his early 1900s paintings. Early movement studies in photography and Anni Alber’s interlocking forms and limited palette.

POST 7

Kia ora, @k_jwoods here for post 7 

In 2012, I had a life changing experience on a @asianewzealandfoundation residency at Three Shadows Photography Centre, Caochangdi, Beijing. I backpacked through China 10 years earlier and it was amazing to return. 

The Centre was founded by the extraordinary RongRong and Inri, well-known for their individual and collaborative photography. It is dedicated to contemporary photography and video art – one of the first in China. It's setting Caochangdi, was a vibrant mix of village life and art galleries. Ai Weiwei lived nearby at the time. 

Highlights were visiting Wang Qingsong's studio and his wife Fang's Chinese contemporary art history classes.

I found artist villages compelling. Many had galleries amongst houses/studios, providing space for artists to experiment. Near the outskirts of Caochangdi was ‘Juangita art complex’. Led by curiosity I walked down a dirt road until I came to a clump of half-finished buildings. Greek in style, and so incongruous of their surroundings they seemed surreal and hidden behind was the artist village.  Hardly any galleries were open, but its utopian structures were impressive; a huge cubist form of rusted metal and an immense hulk of grey minimalist brick formed another gallery. A giant spider sculpture swung eerily from the power lines.

In China I researched constructed photography and how the beginnings of contemporary art evolved there.  I became fascinated by the Xiamen Dada Group, an important part of the avant-garde 85' Wave Movement, especially the photo documentation of their happenings and performance from 1986. I was interested in how contemporary art developed in China. One of the Xiamen Dada's key events took place after their exhibition at the government-run New Art Museum in Xiamen. On closure of the exhibition they burned all of their artwork outside the gallery in a performance. 

Ngā mihi

Kate

POST 8

Post 8 @k_jwoods

A fun project for my last post. In 2016 my Dad and I collaborated on an exhibition together - Camera Hunting.

We both grew up in homes full of old copies of the National Geographic, and share an interest in wildlife/environment and the history of photography.

John, my Dad, enjoys architecture, street and landscape photography but in the last 15 years a large proportion of his subject matter has been documenting wild birds.

Dad explained there are broadly two types of Wildlife photography. The first focuses on stationary portraits or ‘ID photos’, sometimes taken by birdwatchers or scientists. The second focuses on storytelling i.e. wild birds in their natural environment that also tell a story about how they live:  nesting, feeding their young, flying, fighting, etc.  His work is a combination of the two. Focus and sharpness is crucial, especially around the eyes, to identify facial features and feather detail.

I responded to his photography with a series investigating the historical depiction of birds in photography, sculpture and painting.

I  focused on the last 150 years of birds featured in photographic inventions / art movements, such as French photographer Étienne-Jules Marey’s experiments into Chronophotography, the predecessor of film, in the 1880s. Marey’s work, in the dynamics of movement, influenced Italian Futurist Giacomo Balla - his paintings of the early 1900s include abstracted flight paths of birds. Hummingbirds featured in American Harold Edgerton’s pioneering work with electronic flash photography in the 1930s. Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși often used the form of the bird in his work - his abstract sculpture Bird in Space, 1923 caused controversy, subsequent discussion and change in public opinion over what constituted ‘art’.

Thanks for having me on this platform! 

Kia ora rawa atu 

Kate

https://eyecontactmagazine.com review by John Hurrell - 21 May, 2010

Three new billboards recently installed on Reeves Rd across from Te Tuhi, feature enlarged photographic collages by Kate Woods. Woods is known for her chocolate box scenes of forests, mountains and lakes, disrupted by bizarre chains of pyramidal forms floating through the picture plane. In these small hoardings, the flying diamondlike shapes, vaguely similar to the stainless steel sculpture of Gregor Kregar - or something Peter Trevelyan might make - encircle different landscapes some of which are lifted from oil paintings. In other words, the linked angular forms frame new inserted vistas.

Woods’ photographed collages were originally much smaller, and framed under glass, but enlarging them really suits her cheesy landscape subject-matter. It becomes less delicate and crass, and gains punch. The panoramic space becomes more enterable, even though enlarging it makes her cut edges look rougher and less tidy.

Something else happens too. Woods’ prismatic crystalline forms change in the way they can be interpreted. In the hoardings they become more like folded pirate hats or snapping paper dragons. They even appear to be peeling back the photographic plane itself as if it were paper, losing their metallic silver sheen in the process.

So there are several things happening. One is a kind of science fiction scenario where different locations and different time periods are presented in a juxtaposed fashion as equivalent portals. Another is that scenes appear to be bursting through the paper, advancing towards the viewer as if they cannot be contained by the medium or picture plane - as if in an odd sense, they are defying the artist.

Intriguingly such wilderness-based images look natural in a public space because they could at first glance be mistaken for advertising - say for air freshener or European travel. They are not obviously ‘art’ - they could be an enigmatic promotion that eschews words but which is still obvious in its pitch. They signify outdoor ‘wholesomeness’ but are contradicted by the ambiguous necklaces of geometry which appear to stand for something invasive.

These images can be interpreted many ways, yet in an odd sense they are not mysterious. The prisms are too abstract and unintegrated for that. The work doesn’t feel surreal - only coded -and you are not drawn into a beckoning immersive world, even though it does hold your attention and it is cerebrally fascinating.

As non-sites, their titles reference the rock-filled geometric containers of Robert Smithson, and so can be seen as vaguely two-dimensional versions of his project. However their images are from print culture, tourism and art, not the ‘natural’ outdoors directly, so they are a sort of ‘non-site’ even before Woods sees them. In fact through their recycling, it is a telescopic non-site-non-site process she is perpetuating, one non-site incorporating another.

With these enlarged collages, it is really their outdoor location that lets their recontextualised forests and rephotographed water speak - under real dribbling rain and direct sunlight. By placing them outside the gallery Woods’ images oddly reverse Smithson and create a non-non-site-non-site. Maybe even an ‘authentic’, newly discovered ‘natural’ site?

These sampled representations of wilderness, with their clever (perhaps ironic) title, might also be a convoluted and mischievously nihilistic gesture about art history and culture rather than transferred referents of nature. Whatever the case, they intrigue.

John Hurrell

99. Kate Woods
Born Auckland 1981
BFA Elam 2002
Lives in Wellington

Kate Woods is interested in the real, the artificial, and combinations of the two, with a dash of art history thrown in. A viewer looking at one of her paintings or photographs of landscapes has an immediate reaction of recognition, followed by a sense of disquiet. Something is wrong. The paintings of mountain scenes are curiously lacking in detail. The photographs of forests, farms and scenic views seem faded, and contain odd crystalline structures, either piled up, or generating across them like some silicon-based life form. Woods describes her images as ‘places you will never physically arrive in, and yet seem so familiar’.
We see such places every day, in photographs, in magazines or travel brochures, or on the television. Some philosophers have gone so far as to propose that, for many of us this replicated world is indistinguishable from the real world. What if someone artificially alters this world? Newspapers are cracking down on digital alteration of photos – they distort the ‘real’. Woods has no such qualms.

Woods’ paintings of the period 2002-4 are based on found scenic photographs. She presents them as if they were camouflage material, all the elements being rationalised into irregularly shaped solid colours, with a severely limited palette. Foreground, middle-ground and distance become confused, because everything has equal weight. We can recognise a waterfall, mountain range or canyon, but we cannot suspend reality and lose ourselves in such features, making them ‘real’ in our minds.

We have different problems with the photographs. They look like tinted White’s Aviation photos, or poster photos with the reds faded out, and that’s what they are, collected by the artist from junk shops. However, they contain strange accretions of prismatic forms which, although part of the photos, seem to have a greater dimensionality than the other elements in the picture. That is because the accretions are cardboard constructions, made by the artist, placed on the ‘original’ found photos and then rephotographed. A typical work of this series will be four stages removed from reality. The original photo was first, followed by a period of natural fading that altered what was there, followed by Woods’ additions, followed by her photograph of the altered photograph.

The art history element arises from the Earth Art movement of the 1960s, where artists altered the landscape physically, or erected temporary constructions that altered the ambience of an area. Such works often survive now only in photographs. Woods makes models of the original sculptural forms and puts them into her found photographic landscapes. At this level, what was artificially done to real landscapes, then recorded, is now done artificially by Woods to reproductions of real landscapes. Woods has left the philosophers far behind.

Kate Woods work has entered the dialogue of Earth Art and photography from a direction that is made possible through the circumstances of time and place in New Zealand, while still having critical relevancy to the international discussion. With an anachronistic landscape art sensibility, Woodsʼ images balance complex dialogues between photography and sculpture while emphasising openness to the viewerʼs interpretation. David Green and Joanna Lowry engage the idea of performative photography; a photograph can “point to the real while reminding us that photography can never represent it”1. Woodsʼ manipulation of the image instigates an open interpretation and leads to a broad range of possible discussions in sculpture, Earth Art and photography as documentation.
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Beginning with a background of found New Zealand landscape paintings, Woodsʼ images build a tension between painting, sculpture and documentary photography. Inserted into the landscape is a multi-faceted sculptural object that at once transforms the generic landscape into a specific place, the setting of an art experience. The sculptural work has a carefully detailed interaction with the landscape. Oppenheim, Smithson portrays an outsized sculpture hanging in the air and reflected on the surface of the stream. The sculpture in Steam (Morris) begins to fade into the air, emphasising the kinetic and transitive nature of the form.
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The reflective and steam-like qualities as represented in her images provide evidence of the bodily forms direct presence and relationship with the landscape. The photographʼs relationship to the real is confirmed at the same time that it is subverted. These first clues draw the viewer in as they begin to question the space. In relation to grandiose landscape interventions of the 60s and 70s, Woodsʼ images question the permanence of landscape, sculpture, the photograph, and finally our experience of all three. As the steam rises or light is reflected from her sculptural forms, Woods captures a single moment for the viewer to experience a sculpture that only exists in two- dimensional form. The viewer can only ever reach the landscape through the image.
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A photographed sculpture is taken out of time and place when documented. The fact that Woodsʼ sculptures solely exist as an image highlight the non-permanence of art, specifically the moment and place of the experience. Just as Earth art cannot be experienced through documentation, the photograph cannot document this non- place and this non-time, but instead acts as a point of reflection for the viewer. Woodsʼ photographs take on performativity as two- dimensionality of the sculpture becomes evident to the viewer. Are we looking at the landscape, the sculpture, or the photograph? Just as Woodsʼ appropriates the painted landscapes and sculptures to construct a new history, the viewer constructs their own interpretation.

In his 1967 essay ‘Ultramoderne’ American artist Robert Smithson quotes art historian George Kubler as saying that the history of art resembles a ‘broken but much repaired chain made of string and wire’ that connects ‘occasional jeweled links’.[i] The works of two Wellington-based artists Lee Jensen and Kate Woods create a comparable chain of connections with art and design history. In particular, their works examine mysterious traces of culture, revealing how we pick through remnants of the past, making selections and teasing out meaning. Woods and Jensen are each involved in a process of evaluating what is ‘significant’ and what is ‘insignificant’ practice. Jensen elevates marginalia—detail and the decorative—while Woods unpacks the sense of the monumental by making handcrafted marquette renditions of major Land Art works from the 1960s and 70s and incorporating them into found landscape prints.

As well as referring to the fragile lineage of art history, the ‘occasional jewelled links’ are also apt in relation to Jensen and Woods’ individual art practices. Both artists share a fascination with the crystalline and the jewel-like. In 2000, curator Allan Smith developed an exhibition for the Auckland Art Gallery exploring prismatic geometry in recent art, The Crystal Chain Gang. In the exhibition catalogue, Smith argued that: ‘The crystal, an object in which mathematics and mysticism are often said to meet, has a long history in human culture and a special place in modernity.’[ii] The idea of the crystalline suggests a slow evolution of form, from a simple shape to something quite complex and fractured.

Crystalline forms are frequently associated with a sense of modernity or futurism; as Gilles Deleuze put it, ‘What we see in the crystal is always the bursting forth of life, of time, in its dividing in two or differentiation.’[iii] Crystalline shapes can seem strangely ‘out of this world’—as evidenced by Robert Smithson’s description of one of Donald Judd’s works as like a giant crystal from another planet. Intriguingly, photographs of some Land Art projects from the 1960s and 70s resemble strange crop circles or alien-like constructions amidst barren landscapes (eg. Robert Morris’ Observatory 1971).

Kate Woods’ latest suite of work ‘Spaced’ explores the possibility of Land Art works being re- located to typical New Zealand landscapes. Woods has collected found photographs and paintings of landscapes—both scenic and suburban—including the ubiquitous White’s Aviation prints that once graced many a New Zealand home and office. Onto these found images she has constructed and placed painted cardboard structures and then re-photographed the work to make a final two- dimensional photographic image. Crystalline forms seem to be growing and multiplying, as though these works once released into the landscape kept evolving and morphing. Some works reference particular Earthworks such as Carl Andre’s Rock Rile (1968), Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) and Walter de Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977).

Woods’ photographed cardboard forms have a pseudo-mathematical feel to them and they have a striking parallel in Gavin Hipkins’ 1999-2000 photographic suite The Model (Action). This is a suite of images documenting painted cardboard mathematical models constructed by a Victoria University mathematics lecturer in the 1960s to demonstrate ‘the ninety-two non-uniform convex polyhedra with regular faces’. Far from being precise and highly finished, these models are, like Woods’ constructions, endearingly handcrafted and slightly wonky.

Kate Woods is intrigued by the use of photography to document Land Art projects and the often strict limitations the artists placed on photography of their works. Frequently people were banned from taking any photos of the works on site—hence only a few authorised photographs exist of many major works such as The Lightning Field. For most of us, our experience with these works is through small photographic reproductions—frequently in black and white—in books and magazines; or in our imaginations as we try and visualise the scale and monumentality of such works. Woods
has placed her fictional land artworks within similarly fictitious landscapes, what she describes as ‘places you will never physically arrive in yet seem familiar.’[iv]

While Woods has scoured op shops for the kitsch landscape prints that form the sites of her Land Art works, Lee Jensen has trawled the history of typography and design for forms and symbols to make up his work ‘Five Treasures’. Jensen is inspired by print ephemera, what he calls ‘the dust of design’. He has written that: ‘Ornament, like dust, is what remains, a reminder of past fancies forgotten; and not just ill-remembered, but abandoned, like a child at a fair, youthful cupidity, print ephemera, old pornography in a cupboard. My work starts in this place, a site of some friction and chaffing between worlds. I want to pick up these fragments, bring this “grammar of ornament” into a contemporary context with all its baggage—vapidity, kitsch, the sweet rot of bathos. Can ornament still resonate or suggest a new interpretative vocabulary? Is the symbolic lexicon of decoration still valid, or a site for the production of new forms?’[v]

To experience Jensen’s work from beginning to end it is imperative to ‘walk the line’ of the room. Pattern emerges from the wall, crystalline in its detail and complexity building to a powerful crescendo of pattern and colour. Jensen pulls together fragments from across cultures; east meeting west in a fascinating interplay of historical forms and contemporary material: laser-cut acrylic vinyl used by industrial sign writers.

In ‘Walk The Line’, Jensen and Woods collage together remnants of history and fantasy. Through Jensen’s elevation of marginalia and ephemera and Woods’ handcrafted miniature monuments, these artists demonstrate that sampling from the past, the pick and mix of historical quotation, continues to be an important aspect of contemporary art practice.

“‘When the crystal makes the eternal visible, or the universal concrete, it also makes the real virtual and the visible an illusion’(1)”

The documentation of art can be illusive process. For a long time we have known to be sceptical of the photograph as a record of truth, but for the land artists of the 1960s and 70s documentation was a vital procedure before nature reclaimed its course. In rendering land art in two dimensions, these reproductions remain a mere echo of the spaces that are no longer accessible, and the surviving images (far removed from the actual sites) have come to stand for the works themselves.

To some extent documentation has become the art, and by nature of the viewer’s passive acceptance we believe these records without question. Growing up in a country which brands itself based on its landscape, we are so bombarded with images that it can be difficult to distinguish between the memory of physically visiting a place and the removed viewing of it. Though we may not have skied down the slopes of Mt Ruapehu, we come to identify it based on our exposure to paintings and tourism material. Therefore, whether we have actually visited is irrelevant when measuring our familiarity with its image.

In contrast to gallery based art, land art sought to make an impact on the environment, whether via community-based restorative actions or individual artist-as-pioneer (often ecologically detrimental) efforts. Carl Andre’s Rock Rile (1968), Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed (1970), Robert Morris’s Observatory (1971) and Walter de Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977) are just some of such works referenced in Kate Woods practice.
During the 1960s and 70s documentation of land art was very selective with heavy restrictions on who was allowed to photograph such experiential works. Often only one photographer was permitted to document the works and as a result only one perspective was recorded. Due to their nature some works have long since deteriorated with many no longer existing other than through documentation. Only a small audience were able to physically experience the works, while the rest of us were destined to experience the works hypothetically in the depths of our imagination.

Robert Smithson’s work is of particular significance to Woods’ practice. Smithson exhibited his non-sites (1968) as self-contained installations of earth samples and records in modernist gallery environments.(2) His interest in the crystalline as a symbol of the ‘ultramoderne’(3) incorporated the use of mirrors, like Woods’ floating multifaceted and refracted forms. Woods’ amalgamated works are a continuation of Smithson’s non-sites. By recontextualising the site specificity of land art, both Woods’ and Smithson’s works consider the integrity of documentation.

In 1919 a group of artists and architects lead by Bruno Taut established themselves as the Crystal Chain Gang. A utopian avant-guard art movement interested in the scientific and spiritual aspects of crystal forms, the CCG envisaged all that was crystalline as a marker of truth. Eighty years later Allan Smith curated The Crystal Chain Gang: prismatic geometry in recent art for the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki. Woods’ works not only pay homage the land artists of the 1960s and 70s, but also references recent Crystal Chain Gang member Gavin Hipkins, whose 1999-2000 series was titled The Model (Action).

For this work Hipkins documented the cardboard construction of a ‘ninety-two non-uniform convex polyhedra with regular faces’ (4) as originally demonstrated during the 1960s by mathematician David Patterson. Extending this artistic exploration of geometric space Woods’ combination of sculpture, photography and the look of cubist painting is essentially about real and constructed space. Working with a two dimensional reproduction of an originally three-dimensional work, Woods produces a three- dimensional object (painted cardboard sculptures) that (photographed) are in turn reduced back to two dimensions. By repeatedly re-working the spatial characteristics of these objects, Woods can be understood as testing the identity of these works across their successive reproductive mediums. Such investigations are as much about representation itself as they are about the identity of the original art works.

Nesting artificial sculptures within ‘natural’ scenery, Woods draws attention to the way particular landscapes are constructed. Be they Romantic- Sublime, aerial survey shots of New Zealand farmland, Blair Witch style forests or chocolate box landscapes; each identifies a different relationship to and production of the land. Through re-presenting these images within the gallery setting and juxtaposing them against cubist forms, Woods focuses on these processes. By subjecting them to the critical artistic gaze Woods encourages us to question our production and consumption of the land. Through her use of local backgrounds, Woods’ re-staging of land art investigates the credibility of documentation. By reproducing and re- presenting land art forms in a New Zealand environment, (often using imagery that pre-date the American originals such as in Beams and Rockpile) Woods’ crystalline sublime educes confusion as to when and where (and whether or not) they once existed.

Drawing on the ideas of French social theorist Jean Baudrillard, Woods considers her Spaced series as a ‘kind of’ simulacra (5) Baudrillard defines simulacra as the copy without an original (6) and argues that we now live in a hyperreal world, made up of simulacra, or representations that do not have any model in the ‘real world.’ Her finished works are like simulacra, as copies assembled with many ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ locations and materials that together never existed originally.

The two elements that make up Woods’ works (landscapes and crystalline forms) are questionable in terms of their ‘real-ness.’ Woods’ recycled landscapes are sourced from popular culture rather than actual places seen. As simulacra these images exist as archetypes of our collective social memory rather than ‘real’ places. Likewise her photographed cardboard sculptures are based on black and white reproductions of land art from art texts. Though the representation of land art still exists the ‘real’ work has long since deteriorated. Thus Woods’ forms have no real world equivalent from which to claim their status as true representations, they are simulacra. Baudrillard writes that ‘reality itself founders in hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another, reproductive medium, such as photography, from medium to medium the real is volatised” .(7) In a similar way Woods meticulous reduplication and re-presentation of 1960’s and 70’s land art through medium after medium volatises how we understand space, form and representation.

I’m living at Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, in an extraordinary brick building designed by the artist Ai Weiwei, who lives down the road. The Centre was founded by the artists RongRong and Inri, well-known for their individual and collaborative photography. This art space is dedicated to contemporary photography and video art – one of the first of its kind in China; and I’m here as a recipient of an Asia New Zealand Foundation artist residency.

Caochangdi, where I am, forty minutes from central Beijing, is a vibrant mix of village life and art elite creating an eclectic mix of buildings, art galleries and happenings.

One recent morning I woke to what sounded like gunshots outside. Looking through my narrow bathroom window I saw plumes of mysterious pastel pink smoke rising from the street. Later, on a walk, I spied a giant pink blow up archway covered in images of heart and cupids and leftover pink streamers covered the ground – I assume the morning fireworks were part of a wedding.

This side of Caochangdi where Three Shadows is based has tree-lined roads. At night everyone comes out to eat together and gossip. The narrow lanes become full of happy gangs of miniature dogs.  

At the moment driving toddlers around the streets in large remote-controlled vehicles seems to be a fad. The first one I saw was a small baby being driven in a plastic red convertible down the road, via remote, by its father. Last night I saw another small child being remote-driven in a replica police jeep.

I’ve been to a few other artist villages in the past week. One visit was to return artwork from a friend to a local artist. I was awarded, for my journey, with an hour long tea ceremony. This involved Lao Xiang soaking the beautiful clay teapots and cups in tea – the tea was eventually poured into tiny, low circular vessels. Xiang trained as a sculptor but now works primarily as a photographer and assists Western artists, on residencies, to create large scale sculptural works. We are close in age; and note that much is similar, such as our generation of artists training in one art form but working in another.

Although since the 1990s the contemporary art scene in China has moved away from the collective, to individual exploration of ideas, artists seem to still band together in terms of how art is shown. Some groups of artists have tried to normalise avant-garde art so that it is not politically interfered with. There still seems to be some invisible rules about what is ok to exhibit in public. New types of exhibition spaces help the cause and so do independent curators who are often themselves artists. This is where the villages really come in to play – a singular place where the artist lives and exhibits too. Many villages have galleries amongst their houses and studios, providing space for artists to experiment – sometimes with no commercial or political agenda.   

Closer to home, near the outskirts of Caochangdi, I came across a small sign announcing the ‘Juangita art complex’. Led by curiosity I walked down a dirt road until I came to a clump of half-finished buildings. Greek in style, and so incongruous of their surroundings they seemed surreal. Hidden behind them was the artist village.  Hardly any galleries were open, but still, its utopian structures were impressive; a huge cubist form of rusted metal and an immense hulk of grey minimalist brick formed another gallery, with a peep hole for a window.

A giant spider sculpture swung eerily from the power lines, a left over from the village’s more active past. Residents still live there and the experimental architecture of their homes is fascinating.

So many things in China are built on a monumental scale. It’s rumoured that a new art gallery is to be built with the sole aim of making it bigger than any other gallery in the world. Still, I wonder why so much of the art is built on such a large scale. Is it paralleling the impressive historical and architectural history of Beijing? I bought a book on Wang Qingsong’s work the other day, after a visit to his studio and immense constructed photographs. The writer, a Western curator Jeremie Thircuir, was asking similar questions in the book about the scale of Qingsong’s pieces. He compares their size to Chinese scrolls, ‘bigger than what the mind can capture in one glance’. 

I travelled in China ten years ago but hardly recognise Beijing this time around. Cranes loom everywhere. The sheer amount of construction is incredible. Demolition takes place in view of many blocks of new foundations and real estate hoardings.  

On my way back in to Beijing via an outer subway line I noticed new communities of identical, souped-up, stone mansions being built amongst the dusty mist of rural land. I couldn’t document them from the subway and there were no formal roads to come back along. The infrastructure had still to be built, and so the mansions were, for the time-being, husks of stone within rural fields.