Kate Van der Drift

In Dance, Dance , award winning artist Kate van der Drift explores some of the complexities and paradoxes inherent in the concept of caring for the whenua (land) in a time of environmental precarity. Rather than using cameraless photography to draw attention to much-loved native plant species, such as kahikatea,...

Known for her large-scale ‘river exposures’ the artist has extended her camera-less photographic explorations in this evocative new series, gently collaborating with nature and utilising site-specific materials. In the Presence of Absence draws from the dense fluidity of Waikato's peat lakes, sites of both ecological richness and historical significance. Formed...

In our image dense culture we tend to both produce and consume what could be termed ‘fast photography’. We can lose the ability to enjoy photography as a process, as well as the capacity to deeply notice what it can show us; visual overwhelm doesn’t encourage careful observation. As the...

Close to this bank a lightproof case is partially suspended underwater; its oscillating movements belie the force of the currents below where freshwater microorganisms drift through organic detritus, algae and farm run-off. Within this case lives a 4x5” negative film sheet, protected from the light but exposed to the pollutants...

Forested, low-lying wetlands have been burned off, drained and cultivated into today’s lattice of paddocks, intersected by waterways contaminated with farm run-off. Site-specific camera-less ‘river exposures’ on large format film are created by placing unexposed colour negatives in the Piako river’s tributaries for a period between two and four weeks....

Directional Listening: Fluvial Field Notes A desire emerged to put my ear to the riverbank. I remembered Barbara Hurd’s poetic essay about listening with her head in the dirt. Eavesdropping on the landscape. Attentive. “How often, after all, have our own deaf ears been a cause of hostility and longing?[1]”...

Water Slows as it Rounds the Bend is part of an ongoing investigation into the fragile ecology and transformation of the Hauraki Plains. The groundwater of the present day Plains is tightly controlled; few clues remain of the great fertile wetland, yet concealed in the centre of the gridded farmland...

11am on Saturday 28 October 2017 Sanderson Contemporary, Newmarket Planning and funding an art collection takes strategy and insight. Learn from the best with a public talk, followed by a Q & A, with two leading experts in the field. Leigh Melville is a Director of the industry-leading art auction...

Photography has been seen as enabling a realm beyond natural vision, revealing visions previously unavailable to the human eye. Photographer Kate van der Drift similarly pictures what Walter Benjamin referred to as the “optical unconscious” (3). She does not snap to serve the heady aesthetics consumed by so many fans...

Photography saturates more and more as an inseparable part of the everyday – multiple screens are a common part of home and work life, calling for our attention to buy, look, engage, respond, like. Single Channel is a collection of photographic works that each have their own definitive message and...

One of the earliest art forms, landscape has been used throughout the ages to capture, depict and communicate the natural world. The genre of landscape has shifted away from scenery painted to decorate the interior to an increasingly politicised subject matter created to provoke and question the human condition and...

Eventual Efflorescence is a new series that depicts the banal realism of an everyday, suburban environment. These scenes are as recognisable and familiar as any one of the many new subdivisions continually springing up across the developed world. The images are difficult to locate within Aotearoa, or any specific region;...

An aesthetic of beauty, still life, and the sublime is central to Kate van der Drift’s photographic practice. When exploring land and seascapes amidst decline, beauty becomes political. Water, in particular, is a central motif throughout the artist’s current photographic work, which explores post-event landscapes through constructed scenes and digitally...