The Space Between US

Waiho i te toipoto

Kaua I te toiroa

Let us keep together not wide apart

The Space Between Us Symposium was initiated to create space for the creative research practice of our staff to be seen by both students and stakeholders, as well as enabling a discourse between us around the state of the arts within the context of the institution in 2022. The exhibition provides an opportunity to explore the conceptual and physical spaces between the disciplines of Creative Industries in our seemingly dispersed and nomadic relationship with Te Whare Wānanga o Wairaka.

Art practice is diverse and interrogatory, while also culturally and socio-politically positioned. Within an institution offering a range of creative practice we acknowledge the gallery as fundamentally both an education tool and sociocultural interface – a space in which play may occur, questions can be asked and the way in which the world is made sense of is articulated. Further to this we acknowledge the significance of the sites that we occupy and the potential for challenging the relationship of artist and audience as we move outside conventional modes of performance and presentation. The symposium space loosens institutional conventions for assembling and presenting knowledge, inviting conversations between staff, students, wider arts professions and communities across the creative industries sector.

While caught in the uncertainty of a global pandemic, which has seen many of us reconsider the implication of proximities and extend the way we practice through virtual and digital platforms, this exhibition and symposium aims to bring the creative outputs from Creative Industries into common spaces as a shared dialogue across both events. With the locations of the school shifting physically, the purpose, to celebrate bringing the people and conditions of these programmes together seems more crucial than ever before.

The kaupapa for The Space Between Us extends to generate discourse in response to the land and spaces we occupy across a range of place-based arts practices. We celebrate the closing of the exhibition with a slow hīkoi of performative and participatory works across the whenua; beginning at the Noho Kotahitanga Marae to arrive at Gallery One, located in Building 76. This ambulatory symposium enables a critical space of activation, practice and discussion, situated within the land we currently occupy - it’s histories, current stories and futures as a site of knowledge. 

Gina Ferguson and Becca Wood

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THE SPACE BETWEEN US (…for Lou)

Space is not a singularity and those spatialities that intervene between any of us are inherently temporal. Neither distinct nor static, space’s perceived homogeneity proves multiplicitous and continually in dynamic flux as it swarms with numerous histories that trouble the myth of a material present and future’s yawning potential. Although we are socialised to frame out such multiplicity and the differences it carries, The Space Between Us provides an invitation to both recognise and confront something specific that intercedes, especially between those researching artists and designers who come across each other in the institutional corridors of an asylum-turned-polytechnic, which is currently experiencing spatial upheavals of relocations, closures and downsizing within an extended pandemic.

Since I began teaching and reviewing art and design students 30 years ago, locating Building 76 on Unitec’s campus – where GALLERY ONE is housed – has always proved a challenging task. However, my first disorientating encounter with this Victorian brick edifice took place in 1981 when visiting Carrington Hospital to see one of my best friends from high school with whom I had drifted apart, due to her descent into psychosis. I wandered the corridors past open cells with bare mattresses on floors and agitated people in various stages of undress before bumping into Lou who had just come out of the shower, a towel wrapped over her pregnant belly as she was only days away from giving birth. Heavily medicated, she took me to her cell where she shared dark conspiracies, leaching the colour from my day before I staggered back into the light of a seemingly ‘saner’ world.

So, the melancholic black and white photograph of a Patient’s Hut (1993) on the exhibition poster, taken a decade after this visit, seems familiar and touching as it references the Asylum Collective (Susan Jowsey, Allan McDonald and Marcus Williams) who documented the abandoned spaces of the hospital and its grounds (soon to be Carrington Polytechnic), featured in Photoforum the following year under the title, ‘Idlers, indigents, vagrants, artists, criminals, children, savages, brutes, religious fanatics, idiots, madmen’. This image of a makeshift shack propped up against a plane tree represents a transitional space, caused by the state’s deinstitutionalisation of psychiatric care where lack of continuity and unsuitable placements saw many “caught in the cracks”, including dear Lou who, leading a peripatetic life upon release, disappeared from the view of friends and family.

Whether a colonial monument or improvised shack, architecture itself defines the space between us, evident in Allan McDonald’s Window, Building One Te Whare Wānanga o Wairaka (2017) in which the larger version of Building 76 has proved even more disorienting with its labyrinth of corridors and unexpected lightwells, a view of which the photographer refers to as “a panoptic dead-end”. McDonald reminds us that the 150-year-old edifice – currently deemed an earthquake risk – is as ephemeral as the short-lived cabin in history’s ever-expanding trajectory.

Before entering GALLERY ONE, Dale Leyland’s installation, Be Your Own Demigod utilizes the selfie to stress that the space between self and its representation is as virtual as it is visceral in order to frame fleeting constructions of desire. This embodied engagement is further explored by choreographer Becca Wood and typographer Jonty Valentine via their site-specific “typochoreography” featured in If these Walls Could Talk. Black vinyl lettering on the lobby’s facing walls not only denote our embodied relationship to the built environment but also connect us to the ground below. Instructions to stamp the floor, evokes whenua and the nearby spring Te Wai Unuroa o Wairaka that rises and flows through the campus. Here the space between us is ‘disciplinary’ in both meanings of the word: corrective through the architectural typologies of 19^th-century asylum overlaid with spatialities of a 20^th-century tertiary institution; at the same time focused on fields of expertise that intersect enough for typography to choreograph movement.

More intersecting fields unfold and interconnect upon entering the gallery itself with works on walls, plinths and in vitrines, created by painters, sculptors, performers, graphic designers and photographers. Kristy Gorman’s large ink on paper, Vantage (2017), hovers like a skin on the ubiquitous white wall, while six smaller works, titled Skying I-VI (2021/2022) inhabit a long freestanding cabinet that can be viewed from all sides, thereby skewing the vantage point and challenging our perspective of the work. The titles suggest that in looking down we are in fact gazing up, rendering the vitrine a reflective pool.

Paul Woodruffe’s 9 Oblique Meditations, deliberately placed near the gallery’s window, reference the outside world through a participatory card game of sorts, which connects specific surrounding campus sites to graphic slides that denote architectural and landscape elements. Encouraging us to leave the gallery, this work of ‘play’ asserts that the space between us is always a variable distance that is both physical and imaginary. 

While Woodruffe invites us to walk and observe, Gina Ferguson documents her own perambulations and observations through St.roll, which also involves collections. A rusty garland, threaded with flattened metal bottle tops retrieved from the ground is laid onto a sheet of glass within a glowing vitrine. Fabricated from the abject, this necklace of eroding mementoes, discarded by imbibing locals and collected by the artist, is both compelling and repellent, reminding us that another temporal scale is at work through microbes and decomposition that bely the assemblage’s static beauty as an encased artwork.  In her painting Hard Matter, Emma Smith also suggests that the artwork is always alive with molecular materiality rendering it dynamic, porous and in constant motion. Intimate in scale and treatment, the surface of the canvas invites the viewer to ponder for a moment in an intense and tenuous world. 

Like Ferguson and Smith, Yvonne Shaw captures the fleeting and vestigial in Flamingo Motel (Pool) (2015), which is part of her photographic series The Reality Principle: documenting the roadside motor hotel as the transitional space par excellence; exemplifying a “felt tension between the freedom of solitude and the discomfort of isolation”. She shares a partial view of the pool and entry to dressing rooms with two moulded plastic chairs: ensuring that any notion of pleasure derived from such a space is usurped by the reality of her seemingly candid gaze. However, other photographs in Shaw’s series demonstrate her operating between documentary and staged photography: thereby testing the reality principle and its relation to the authentic image.

Vanessa Byrnes explores the space between generations – between the living and the dead, between genealogical origins and the lived moment – in two photographs titled Home: Two Grandmothers, Ballinderry, Tipperary, Ireland; Point Chevalier, Auckland, Aotearoa/ New Zealand in which situated objects stand in for the departed and form a mise en abyme into loss. An actor and director, currently heading Unitec’s School of Creative Industries, Byrnes’ participation in The Space Between Us traverses the gap between the performing and visual arts, as well as between academic staff and management in an increasingly bureaucratic tertiary environment that progressively threatens the horizontal field of collegiality.

As Byrnes’ images span time and space while bridging academic roles, so Karen Crisp participates through Kahikatea (stack) (2007), a photograph asserting both our colonial past and ecologically destabilized present through its depiction of a monumental pile of dismembered native trees that overwhelm a stand of living kahikateas. Images like this trouble Aotearoa’s ongoing 100% Pure tourism campaign in which distance fondly looks our way, perceiving a clean green utopian land rather than despoiled shores.

Works featured in The Space Between Us resist the binary oppositions of humanism that has for too long centred the singular European male at the expense of other entities, cultures, genders and species: all rendered ‘other’. Instead, a posthuman sensibility activates the work, troubling privilege and complicating duality. The space between us is not only physical embodied distance, but psychic territory, palpable tension, unsettling histories, inequitable relationships and living ecologies: powerful material for collaborating artists and colleagues to discursively explore and productively manifest. Yet, a melancholy pervades this exhibition that asserts art and design as a situated practice, in this case on troubled ground during challenging times. But maybe I can’t help contemplating the time and distance between me and dear Lou with whom I once shared dancing, drawing, music-making and a love of life?

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