hamishpetersen

[hamishpetersen]

Reading Artists' Books with Interjections from a Daphne on Pete's Front Step

An essay I wrote about artist books by Tim Veling, Kate Newby and Alexa Wilson for the site Contemporary HUM.

[hamishpetersen]

Heavy Trees, Arms and Legs

A book project made when I was writing and publications Co-ordinator at The Physics Room Gallery in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. Features the artworks of Sorawit Songsataya and Nicola Farquhar following their exhibition at Te Aratoi o Whakatū, The Suter Gallery, curated by Abby Cunnane. Published by The Physics Room Edited by Hamish Petersen and Gwynneth Porter Designed by Yujin Shin Contributors include: Abby Cunnane, Nicola Farquhar, Gregory Kan, Rebecca Tamás, Sorawit Songsataya

[hamishpetersen]

Garden for JC

A garden I designed and planted for a friend using entirely Aotearoa native perennials on one side of the steps, and mediterranean groundcover herbs on the other. Includes:

Veronica vernicosa / odora / buxifolia (Koromiko) Small grasses i.e. Carex comans / buchanii / flagellifera Libertia ixiodes / grandiflora (Mikoikoi) Acanea Purpurea / caesiiglauca (Piripiri) Leptinella 'Platts Black' Ophiopogon planiscapus Pittosporum / Lemonwood (Tarata) Pseudopanax crassofoliu / lancewood (Horoeka)

creeping Thymus and Rosemarinus species Salvia officinalus Origanum vulgare etc etc.

[hamishpetersen]

Interview with Editor Ataria Sharman for Pantograph Punch Magazine, NZ

[hamishpetersen]

Goldfish Bowl

Text commissioned for the inaugural exhibition at Wave Project Space, Ōtepoti Dunedin:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Wave Project Space (@waveprojectspace.otepoti)

Listen to “So Tough” by The Slits. Make a cup of weak tea just to keep your hands warm and look out the only window in the living room. Doesn’t get much sun in April. Less in May, this side of the valley. You try not to check your notifications. You try to sit still. It’s not easy.

James Varga’s pictures form a haphazard diary to the last eighteen months. Starting with a return to their childhood pencil copies of cartoons, Varga began drawing again. It was a way to record the important parts of their world, or process the emotional soup through which we each wade. Rather than making pictures to “say something,” painting became a practice of picturing the world Varga needed to see. Similarly, they use their mother’s surname to claim that part of themselves.   

The difference between a diary and an autobiography is the audience. “What should my reader know?” “Does anyone ever need to see this?”

Listen to “Identity” by X-ray Spex. There is a picture of Varga’s legs stretching out to a sunburnt Alexandra backyard. Dead washing machine and semi-rural ¼ acre dream detritus. There is a picture of chopped fish and fish heads. If you know, you know. Being Tauiwi or Tangata Tiriti in Te Wai Pounamu can be full of placelessness; being anywhere at all down here can feel like the wrong place to be. Sometimes, we blame ourselves. Varga’s POV pictures evoke this feeling of waiting around for something to make sense. But pictures like that of the dish of fish heads have a different effect; like the sour umami of a fish head soup on a table of boiled hams and carrots; finding what you were looking for. 

Listen to “Pay to Cum” by Bad Brains. Varga adds a generous cock to a pencil drawing of one of their friends. For a laugh? Or because it needed to be said? In my brief conversation with Varga, it’s clear they are trying to cut through the absurd violence of masculine performance. There is a CD case for John Rowles’ “HITS collection” on the floor in the photo Kari sends me. It’s beside a painting of a milk bottle and some pencil sketches of muscled butts. 

Pay to write, pay to play

Pay to cum, pay to fight

Listen to “Product of My Environment” by Circle Jerks. There is a picture of a scrotum driving a tank. Like anyone, Varga’s mind wanders. Even when resisting the internet as subject matter or medium, the testicular posturing and violence of the recent invasion of Ukraine brought these globally televised politics into Varga’s pictures. Whether the picture is literal and figurative, or abstracted, comical, and political, Varga’s work seems to always be an act of processing, never solved. 

On Zoom, Varga and I talk about displaying the pictures like a “salon hang,” recalling the Salon exhibitions of the Academie des Beaux Arts in Paris where all the paintings accepted to the institution’s annual exhibition were crammed onto the walls. There’s an irony here for Varga as a self-taught artist. This antiquated mode of display can function in the opposite way to exclusive salons; more like an over-stimulating information soup, or endless Tiktok Trending page.

The high and the low are artificially separated in much of daily life. Instead, just as the punk poets Viv Albertine or Poly Styrene did, we are all cataloguing the boring, normal, enraging, hopeless, loving, small, vital, and forgettable moments of life in our own ways. Varga will keep going whether you’re looking or not. It’s one way of pushing through the clouds.  

[hamishpetersen]

Eating at...

An impromptu text written after eating at the restaurant Londo, in Ōtautahi Christchurch before moving to the UK. PDF designed by me for fun.

https://londo.bar

Eating at

LONDO(3)

Papa is a māmā.

After we finished our desert, my dad said he felt like he had been for a walk in the hills for the night and was arriving back at the car, wishing he didn’t have to go home. The last time I saw my parents, I told them we were moving to Britain; to go farming and vist standing stones, maybe live in the highlands and save some cash caring for plants so that C could make more work in the studio. A way to vacate our selves, or position ourselves elsewhere, requiring us to span a distance between our present and possible versions. We sought out how another piece of land, which knew our old people, might move us so.

Canteloupe is canned fruit salad and eighties holiday sunsets. Anti-anxiety herbal remedy in the first course. Granita disappears and comes back in the pasta. First pork in five years. Blooded salt, melonwater running.

A friend has started their PhD to understand how manipulations to the environment of carrot crops on the canterbury plains can speed their biennial seed cycle. Grow a strong root one year, send up great umbels of flower to set seed the next. A big investment. Canterbury’s immense stakes in the global carrot seed market makes for an abundance of research funding in the area. 

Carrot as speculative capital. Dusty. Aniseed sweet. Of a certain age. Ryegrass gone silver in 4:33pm light. Will be a different shade tomorrow. Carrots have been simmering in that pot for years now. Lorna got married last week! Jewelled rods accross the plate. One of these days the chestnuts will be full and ripe enough to make pie. Caramel roots buoyed by romesco; whatever ectasy that is. Sit down, saucepan in the middle, over-ripe toms and the last basil. Talk for hours. 

In Riverton we bought a few tiny Urenika seed potatoes. More like shrivelled yams than our idea of potatoes. I put them in the ground before Christmas and as the zuchinnis paled and powdered themselves I dug up the smallest bowlful of finglerling tubers from the mass of stems. I had to leave thousands of tiny siblings in the ground ��� marbles who turned glinting, giggling, glassy when rinsed. The following Feburay my flatmate got excited about putting winter greens in and dug up the potatoes that had grown from those abandoned gems. Twice as many, twice the size. Sometimes doing less is better. The tohunga who had these for dinner for centuries really knew what they were doing. 

Sailing a crisp across Lake Buttersauce. Invisible sechuan heat tempered by lemons. When well-boiled, they hold a texture of sandy loam that melts in contact with saliva. We attend a soil cupping. Notes of burnt sugar and echinacea. Abstracted, well-seared cow rectangle galumphs around the table awaiting affection. We take the potatoes for a victory lap.  

Buckwheat filled the garden bed with paddly green leaves until it was warm enough for the tomatoes go in. Hearted leaves  now dangle yellow on jointed scaffolding. Once chantilly cream dollops attracting hoverflies and floating in the breeze on reddish stems, the flowers have become seeds; pyramidial, black. 

When husked, their stony, roasted innards are steeped, syruped, and whipped frozen with cream. Toasted barley tea. Infintely more than bread and beer. The land given maximum and methodical love that it may return; animate. Not just land but lond. From before. Not just papa but Papatuuaanuku. The soil and the waters. Your islands or mine. We go deep into the tunnels to leave our offerings. Can I make a golden silk from this carrot, a cicada’s worship in a cup? Fill it up. Now cannot be before. Look after the new growth in th old place.

When we sat down to dinner my mom handed me a brown envelope. This dinner was my birthday present and I knew there would be a small card. My parents are reliable in these formalities. Small theatre. Inside the card my father had written in his quickest, way-out-the-door handwriting, “You are going to fly away. Take me with you.”

A low, 5:53 lemon sun and the crunch of another evening.

Rats eat the fallen walnuts overnight. 

Pull the drapes

[hamishpetersen]

MA Thesis: "No, we don't need you."

“No, we don’t need you.” Māori contemporary artists, feral poetics, and the possibility of decolonial methodologies for Pākehā/Tauiwi arts-workers.

Abstract

This thesis annunciates the mechanics of coloniality as a force upon Māori curatorial and contemporary artistic practice, and pairs this understanding with learnings from Pākehā/Tauiwi attempts, including my own, to disobey coloniality through relational practices of research and writing towards decolonial ends.

Part 1 addresses the nature of coloniality as a system of power determining the nature of the cosmos, self-servingly and falsely cast as a universal truth in the image of European subjects. I attend to the ways in which Māori artists and writers have negotiated the claims of Pākehā/Tauiwi critics and curators on the terms of engagement that define their art and lives. Chapter 2 attends to Te Maori (1984-7), while chapter 3 brings these ideas to bear on Jacqueline Fraser’s Matakitaki (“The View”) (1993), and exhibitions Whare (2002) and New Zealand Maori Culture and the Contemporary Scene (1966). What becomes clear is the ongoing cosmological struggle of Māori artists to exhibit on the terms they set and have the full implications of their work rub up against a colonial artworld and a disciplinary art history.

Part 2 beings with an exchange with Alex Monteith about the collaborative project Kā Paroro o Haumumu: Coastal Flows Coastal Incursions (2014 –) and its decolonial potential, which alerted me to the disciplinary role of art history as colonial instrument. My poetic, autoethnographic practice becomes increasing visible here and in the final two chapters with Martin Awa Clarke Landgon, Ana Iti, and their artworks. These conversations and encounters demonstrate Māori conceptions of relationality and experience in the mire of neo- colonial Aotearoa, while methodologically keeping me conditionally, bodily accountable as I write about them.

I take these relationships up as offers calling for reciprocity. In response, I produce a text that—in its methodological and written reflexes between history, conversations, theory, artworks, reflections, and poetics—provides an uncertain, feral writing for our irreconcilable relationships.

Submitted November 2021

[hamishpetersen]

Belly full of green

Text commissioned for the exhibition Belly full of green by Caitlin Clarke at Hot Lunch Gallery, Ōtautahi Christchurch, 18 June–3 July 2021

Text on Instagram here:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Hot Lunch (@hot_lunch_)

Documentation images here:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Hot Lunch (@hot_lunch_)

Dear C,

A greasy seam is sewn in the dewed yard. Hedgehog Way. It’s 7:18am and I’m greeting the hens. I wiggle the feeding bucket’s nipple and lodge a chickweed bundle under a brick. This is my time with the past before today begins. I stare at the wet mulch. I see soil-ordinary nothing. I see all the pits people have dug in this soil: midden, kiln, kumara... Maybe if it had never been drained to build roads it would have one day resembled a peat bog: mattressed with moss and heather. So I listen to the stories you tell with your hands to braid yourself back; Neolithic memory humming; immigrant weeds singing in the pot; a shadowed need for old relations; a gift of new language.

*** The ground itself is kind, black butter. [1] 

***

“Could you conjure a church?”

Yarrow asks, in reply to the woman now rolling about on top of them. Weeks ago, she asked Yarrow about the stories in the ground around these lowlands, and how to hear them: the chorus of navigators who’d each found their way up this estuary at different points in the double spiral of its memory. She introduced herself as C. A weird name.

“Well, we need somewhere to gather and listen together.” Says Yarrow, “So maybe make something of hay and mud, or wattle and daub? Maybe we just find the five biggest rocks within rolling distance of this old swamp, bury a third of each in the sandier soils, backfill, and put the biggest on top. Call it a dolmen.”

“Or” C adds, “should we go cottage-core and reassemble that falling-down worker’s hut in a sunny spot and scatter-sow hollyhocks, and foxgloves, and batchelors’ buttons? Or, I know, I’ve got an architect friend. How ‘bout we ask them to draw up something modular with an outdoor kitchen and a bunk house for friends to stay in. We could start a vlog about it and run a PatreonTM to pay the engineers, and pile-drivers, and bristly electricians...”

Some of the geese have gathered and are shaking their heads, sharing glances and knowing brows. A moment passes. Others join.

C brushes her palms across the tops of her tarpaulin thighs, getting the picture. She leans forward on two tree knots and stands, putting one wet leaf palm against her lower back, and then the other. Schlup. Schuup.

“Alright, yeah, good point.” Yarrow breathes out, thinking, “That was close, almost lost another one.” And puts on an encouraging look: five tiny white petals around a domed arrangement of pollen receptors and nectar teeth.

C turns back around to the small assembly.

“Right then, it’s agreed: our church will swallow us and be made of us, house and require us, ingest and digest us. Finally, a place to be together in some mycorrhizal chorus of sensation and story. But it’ll be no bigger than you, y’hear!”

Hedgehog nods, smiling a pine needle grin.

“It should be just big enough to fit the congregation of clovers,” C continues, “So we’ll use those 110ft scots pines over there, let them sit in the river till soft as black pulp, pack them into woven willow, and clear these old pioneer trees to make ash for the potato drills and to glaze the goblets. I don’t think the market will ever recover this time, so let’s not worry about the depreciation of attached dwellings like these. We’ll insulate it with ryegrass in April and wash its walls in kelp slime to keep the rain out. That sounds better eh?”

Walnut drops from the canopy in affirmation. The assembly has grown.

“But where?” C asks.

On an incoming wind, the Harakeke raise their precise voices to the group,

“We know how these soils slip around here. If you can help us keep our rito safe from those steel predators, we’ll send the kōmako out to sing you to the sound places for your structure. There are only a few spots down here where we would all have enough soil around our roots and be woven tightly enough by those last kahikatea to hold us all together, to sing at once under a single roof. Just ask, and we’ll tell you what’s needed.”

A sweet old peach rustles a round of applause and mumbles underleaf to its neighbour,

“I wish that rumply old couple had listened to those folks when they planted us in this slump in 1949. My boots have barely had a breath of fresh air in all those 130-something years!”

C thanks the stand of harakeke and takes another plotting pace in algal galoshes, then back again in sappy clogs, plan crystalising while turning a chestnut and two acorns over in her paw.

There’s an urge to begin in pricked ears and cocked beaks held around the yard. Piwakawaka winks and does a kickflip. The assembly seems to be in agreement. Convivial chatter and planning rises amongst the stray cats and buried family dogs, budgies, and chinchillas. C gets to work drawing up plans with the ants.

“Engage bug mind,” they say. And C sinks in. 

***

Then he is standing very still, concentrating, rocking on the breeze, and he wriggles his fingers and there are hazelnuts. [2]

***

She gives me slushy tiles and bursting stones. Overflowing geology. Extrasensory archaeology. Blinded by the city, we look for miner’s lettuce and ploughman’s luck. But it’s too early. Or all gone. All I can do today is sit near and watch your back. You cast the space between your fingertip and nail in earthenware and ironsands to record who happened there. What was left and what you made from that. It’s warm to the touch now: bleating, bloated, bleeding, beating. Stained grass windows in the last light of the day.

*** My body is the tent of my body And dwells here on earth 

Among us [3]

* * *

1. Seamus Heaney, “Bogland,” Opened Ground (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), 41.

2. Max Porter, Lanny (London: Faber & Faber, 2019), 202.

3. Tusiata Avia, “Apology,” Fale Aitu (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2016), 59.

[hamishpetersen]

An island whose thoughts turn seaward

Short text for the room sheet of the exhibition of the same name by Caitlin Clarke at ADJØ, Ōtepoti Dunedin, 2020

When magma emerges from beneath the crust of the Earth, they call it lava. We look at the rocks half-submerged at Torpedo Bay and my brain turns to algae at the thought of all this rock dripping down the hillside; acrid, black custard hissing into the sea. Molten blood of the Earth. Now limpets, anemones, and broken bottles live in their cupped hands. The body of work shared here is somehow both molten and monumental; tidal and immemorial. Greasy, gritty scum from the top of a muddy puddle. Walnuts rotting in a bucket to stain the cloth. Clay rolled in the hand like a worry-bead moonlights as their basalt cousin in a glazed rockpool. In Caitlin’s brew of claggy, salt-crusted materials, we catch a faint reverberation of some mineral choir before they melt, crumble and re-aggregate in a drain, or a valley—the pit-like archives of the island’s body.

Documentation:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by ADJØ (@adjodunedin)

[hamishpetersen]

Transitional landscapes

Poem for Mitchell Bright's Photobook of the same name about the motorway developments between Christchurch and Rolleston in Canterbury, NZ

All Images courtesy of Mitchell Bright.

[hamishpetersen]

distrust, disorientation, disintegration

Review published in HAMSTER Magazine Issue 4 of:

Daegan Wells A Gathering Distrust Ilam SOFA Campus Gallery 21 February - 22 March

Daegan Wells A Gathering Distrust Ilam SOFA Campus Gallery 21 February - 22 March

distrust, disorientation, disintegration Hamish Petersen

eleven ceramic pots are lined up like a narrow jetty, risking itself the further it extends. they are made of clay Daegan dug from the shores of Moturau, near a memorial for the ‘Save Lake Manapōuri’ Campaign.

“Moturau is the correct Māori name for Lake Manapōuri. […] The name Moturau is sometimes said to have been given by the northern rangatira Tamatea, who travelled through the area with his travelling party after their waka, Takitimu, capsized at Te Waewae Bay.” [1]

Daegan dug the clay not far from where they remember having fallen over on a childhood trip. this was familiar ground at the time. their family had relocated nearby after finding employment in the second hydroelectric project at the lake in the mid nineties. it’s always a strange sensation to fall over on familiar ground, to ram your hip into the kitchen bench while absent-mindedly refilling your water glass. Sara Ahmed reminds me that disorientation, “can shatter one’s sense of confidence in the ground, or one’s belief that the ground on which we reside can support the actions that make a life feel liveable.” [2] for the Save Lake Manapōuri campaigners it was the threat of topographical disorientation that motivated a call to action (for inaction) in a rising euro-american awareness of mass extinction, deforestation, and climate crisis. you’ll have to rearrange your week if the water rises and an isthmus becomes a channel.

“This pass or ford, Te Kauranga, was where waka entered Circle Cove.” [3]

attempting to retain the orientation to the world they had sketched around them, the locals took to public protest action in order to have their lived topography legitimated by the commercial and governmental bodies that threatened to submerge them. the campaigners’ story was somehow written in a script that achieved legibility for those in power, whereas other stories entwined in that whenua at different times were illegible (read: unintelligible (read: unreal (read: illegitimate))).

who gets heard when successive acts of speech are speaking over one-another? over the land. over the silvered macrocarpa of hay barns. over the seasonal tracks to a southern kainga, or the best places to cook in the rain.

in some sense this work subverts the typical reading of craft practices like pottery through these stories. the red, bisque-fired pots on the floor fit readily into a negotiation of binaries and

hierarchies of usefulness / decoration, femininity / masculinity, and particularity between functionality / formalist history in the vein of the pākehā potters and image-makers lauded for their ‘capture’ of an essence of Te Wai Pounamu. however, the way Daegan articulated the space using a projection of pensive, frothing waters onto crisp aluminium in one corner, casting spears and flutters of light across the room, called me into my body. i felt myself small and my movements calculated in order to orient myself to the row of pots in the appropriate way. in this environment the clay forms were language through which land, peoples’ histories there, and Daegan’s relationships with Manapōuri locals were articulated through an embodied process — Daegan and the clay. some stories get through that somehow, not that I need to know all the details. they are not always for everyone to know.

FFO: Ceramics, environmentalism, queer phenomenology, swimming in space, activism, layered histories.

[1]Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu, “Popup Panel: Moturau” Kā Huru Manu, Atlas — A Cultural Mapping Project, 2018, http://www.kahurumanu.co.nz/atlas. [2] Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, (Durham; Duke University Press, 2006), 175. [3] Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu, “Popup Panel: Pakererū” Kā Huru Manu, Atlas — A Cultural Mapping Project, 2018, http://www.kahurumanu.co.nz/atlas.

[hamishpetersen]

Pākehā Listening: my BA (Hons) Thesis

Pākehā Listening and Indigenous Voices in Contemporary Art Research: Troubling neocolonial methodologies toward reciprocal relationality; Working on relationships with Cora-Allan Wickliffe.

Submitted November 2018, Department of Art History and Theory, University of Canterbury, Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand.

From the introduction:

"In this text, I am telling my story of coming to an orientation towards research, towards researching Indigenous artists while being Pākehā, and towards my relationship with Cora-Allan Wickliffe (Ngāpuhi, Tainui, Alofi, Liku). In the face of a global higher education largely fixated on the resolution of inequity with knowledge, language, methods, values, and people descended from the imperialist, European ‘west’—and my lived position within that worldview—I am seeking a methodology that unravels this worldview’s power and implicit oppression of those in its margins through the weaving together of relationships. I attempt this not in order to become the same as, or fully know the indigenous collaborators my Pākehā/Tauiwi self seeks to have a relationship with, but rather to have a relationship that is about difference, in order to reciprocate with one-another by offering ourselves where one of us needs to speak, while the other must recognise the need to listen. Therefore, I am not telling Cora’s story here. I may present Cora’s words as stories on their own, with all the contamination of editing, structure, and framing that this written format implicates. However, through a queer autoethnography, I will tell my story of what happens while feeling, reading, writing, sensing, talking, and listening to my relationship with Cora."

From the Conclusion:

"Judith Butler and Stacy Homan Jones recite a duet about the precarity, obligations, and potential we recognise, when we recognise people as real ‘as they are’ and not as only real ‘for them’. “There is losing; and there is the transformative effect of loss. Neither can be charted or planned.” “After all, if someone is lost and that person is not someone.. ‘Then what and where is the loss and how does mourning take place?" “Queer stories also recount the debts we owe to other’s voices, words, and ways of living and loving—not as a way of getting over or closing down grief or moving on, but instead as an opening up and out into new ways of relating.” Indigenous, Queer, and other exploited and oppressed knowledges and people must be materially empowered as being real, legitimate, speakable, and legible ‘as they are’. Those of us in positions of power must learn to relate in new ways to these people and knowledges not for the survival of difference as a hollowed-out, marketable brand, but rather for the flourishing of healthy ecologies of reciprocity because of difference in order to escape the grips of our shared anthropogenic, and earthly catastrophes. Braiding together people, cosmologies, critiques, and disciplines I have traced a thread through the material, personal, and metaphysical. I recite a story to you, hoping it might pass as a legitimate stepping stone upon which new, equitable methodologies might be realized and practiced."

[hamishpetersen]

Ōtautahi Kōrerotia

Three friends making projects and growing together. Caitlin Clarke, Māia Abraham, Hamish Petersen.

Avon Loop Community Cottage, 28 Hurley Street, Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand, 30 May, 2017 – 28 February 2018

8 Exhibitions 1 Oral history publication 1 Pot-Luck Feast-cum-Performance: Yomtov! 1 Mail art project 1 Collaborative crafting and education project 2019 CNZ Tohunga Tukunga Mentorship Fund

Link to full project archive above ^

[hamishpetersen]

holding many places, all at once

Essay commissioned by The Physics Room Contemporary Art Space, Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand in response to Brian Fuata's performance and exhibition, PLACEHOLDER, 16 July - 20 August 2016.