KATE VAN DER DRIFT

Honey drawing

Opening - Thursday 12th November - 5.30-7pm

Sanderson are delighted to present the exhibition Honey drawing by Kate van der Drift.

Kate van der Drift (b.1985 Aotearoa, New Zealand) is an award winning contemporary photographer living and working in Aotearoa. Her practice is rooted in a deep engagement with ecological processes, human relationships to place, and the possibilities of photography as a form of attentive listening and collaborative storytelling.

In Honey drawing, van der Drift asks what endures when things cannot remain, in an intimate series of experimental photographs. The exhibition considers how rituals of care and making can offer solace amid uncertainty. Working with honey, candle smoke, pūriri leaves and withered flowers, van der Drift continues her practice of embracing the unpredictable collaboration between materials and photographic emulsion, light and time. Drawing inspiration from the fleeting life of the pūriri moth, these delicate works reflect on cycles of life, death and renewal, revealing the quiet beauty and tenderness found in moments of transformation.

Pūriri Metamorphosis

by Janine Randerson

For five or seven years the pūriri moth caterpillar burrows deep into the trunk. The ironwood pūriri tree resists saws and axes, as it has always done since the time of burning. The tree tends to a particular ecology: waxy pink flowers gift nectar to moth and bee pollinators, their interior enzymes transmute sugar to honey, scarlet berries are rumbled by kererū, insectivorous pīwakawaka flit and dive. Beneath, a studio where she presses curled leaves onto a candle-smoked glass plate.

Honey is delivered. The honey becomes a viscous resist, a treacly wade of lines. The cliché-verre negative emerges from the carbon layer of glass from pressing or wiping away the soot-black coating on the surface. She draws with wax, nail polish, paint and honey directly onto the silvered paper’s surface. The outlines of dried flowers glow like heatmaps pale pink and golden, a trace of an ultrasound scan, a fragile alchemy. The uneven, smoked surface is sometimes transparent, sometimes opaque. Colours come with exposure and re-exposure to sunlight and UV. Ash and latent photo-chemicals metamorphosize between bathing, drying, and fixing. Look through one image and see another beyond.

Silver gelatine paper, the tree’s sapwood remembers the strata of air and ash, wax and honey, the humans, plants and biota who lived here before, however briefly. Our cellular memory holds the missing. Messages sift into the names of the images. The evergreen pūriri canopy shelters and gifts oxygen by day, carbon dioxide by night.

The tree misses the old forest that held the hill before the time of the farmland and town. The nation of ngāhere. One night a large, quivering moth with a moss-green head and comets on its wings, crawls from the pūriri hollow. For forty-eight hours it flies clumsily, a nocturnal ghost, laying eggs in the leaf litter under the tree, then gone.

Someone found the wings and made them into a lure to catch a tūna, another moth became a stencil. The tree, the body, the image holds the ones who made their home there. Still deep inside the tree, the body, the image, a feeling.

For a preview catalogue please email info@sanderson.co.nz