Having recently completed their Master of Creative Practice at Unitec, Shona Dey and Cassey Locke display work from their individual research projects. Both artists explore physicality and transformation in their work. Dey’s images of the Māhia Peninsula involve collaboration with place in order to visualise the geologic processes that shape this landscape. Locke’s work investigates a growing ‘death positive’ movement which proposes that death awareness can contribute to improved wellbeing and how the photographic image might play a part in connecting its viewers to mortality
The Hikurangi Subduction Zone is located off the east coast of New Zealand and is responsible for powerful earthquakes, land upheaval, and tsunami. This project is situated in the Māhia Peninsula, which is significant from both cultural and scientific perspectives. Through repeated visits to Māhia, it became evident to me that simply taking photos of this place was not going to be enough to convey its geologic intensity and the processes that shape the landscape. As a result, I embarked upon a shift from traditional landscape photography towards a practice that encompassed a collaborative approach; one that involved working with the agency of the natural elements present in this Miocene landscape. My research question emerged: ‘how can photography extend the limits of its optical boundaries to engage with and reveal non-visual elements of the landscape?’ The experimental methods developed in the course of my practice resulted in a new understanding of the way in which certain dynamical processes within natural systems are echoed in the interactions between these elements and the photographic
c-print. The resulting body of work is ‘Experiments in the Transient’.
Shona Dey, 2022
Emerging research and a growing ‘death positive’ movement proposes that death awareness can contribute to improved wellbeing (Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 2012). Through practice-based research and ethnographic methods, I investigate how the photographic image might play a part in connecting its viewers to mortality. The theoretical framework for this research is influenced by Roland Barthes, who claimed that every photograph is a representation of death. The research is also influenced by Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny and Julia Kristeva’s writings on abjection.
I awoke one morning late in 2018 to a very tangible sense of my own mortality. It was not a frightening experience, but none the less incredibly poignant. I realised that I had never properly contemplated the reality of my own death, always glazing over the death part and focusing on what may or may not come after. It sounds like something that should be obvious, but I grew up in a Christian family, and death was always superseded by an afterlife. After stepping away from the church, I needed to rebuild my ideas of the world and this work is part of that exploration.
As an artist, I turned to my practice in order to make sense of my mortality… Photography has become a therapy of sorts, allowing me to externalise some of my conflicts and make meaning of an emerging dialogue with death. This has been the start of a journey of discovery and growth in my practice. I think it is important to note that this work is not influenced by the current COVID-19 pandemic or by the death of someone close to me. Harbinger is a general exploration and meditation on mortality, and the temporality of people and things.
Cassey Locke, 2022
