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, as she has in the past, van der Drift has focused on the less heroic members of the plant community: invasive introduced species – specifically those growing at Waitawa Regional Park, where she was the 2024 Auckland Council Artist in Residence.
These otherworldly images register the ghostly traces of woolly nightshade, gorse, bindweed, needle grass, wilding pines and other introduced plants, hinting at the layered history of colonisation and human occupation of this land on the edge of Tāmaki Strait south-east of Tāmaki Makaurau.
The lumen exposures in Dance, Dance resulted from the alchemical coming together of natural and manmade entities: sunlight, plant material, silver, herbicide and marker dyes. Van der Drift placed each plant on a sheet of large-format, silver gelatin film outdoors, and then developed the film using herbicides and marker dyes – not just any herbicide, but the type commonly used to kill the plant being documented in each photograph.
That such, sublimely beautiful images being produced in this way is nothing short of magic. These photographs underline the entanglement of nature and culture in conservation efforts, such as those occurring at Waitawa where introduced plants are being eradicated and native flora are re-established. In, Nassella Tenuissima (Fine Stemmed Needlegrass) Positive you can almost feel the sharp, scratchy texture of the grass and its seeds sticking to your hair and clothes as they hitchhike across the land in a determined effort to propagate. The dirty pink background in this work emphasises its highly synthetic nature, reminding us of photography’s underlying subjectivity. The counterpart to this photograph is the more sombre-toned Nassella Tenuissima (Fine Stemmed Needlegrass) Negative, whose charcoal-black background is shot through with faint streaks of purple and green, and overlaid with cloudy white lines.
In this exhibition, van der Drift continues to collaborate with nature by setting up conditions which allow it to express its own agency; to communicate and represent itself rather than being a passive ‘object’ of the camera’s lens. By giving up a substantial amount of control over her photographic processes, van der Drift reveals the liveliness of nature, and continues to challenge the antagonistic boundaries between nature and culture, which reinforce the view that nature exists solely for the benefit of humans.
These photographs remind me of a passage in the book Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, in which the editors assert that every landscape is haunted with past ways of life, and that the presence of this past can only be felt indirectly (1). They say that it is important to pay attention to the ghosts that inhabit landscapes, because, as humans reshape the landscape, they forget what was there before – a tendency which ecologists refer to as ‘shifting baseline syndrome’. (2)
Like all landscapes Waitawa has ghosts, and the introduced plants in these images are some of them. Before Auckland Regional Council purchased the land in 2004, Waitawa was used for farming and other industrial activities. It was leased by Australian-based multinational corporation Orica, one of the world’s largest providers of commercial explosives and blasting systems used in mining, quarrying, oil and gas, and construction industries. The company built a wharf for loading and unloading explosives onto ships in the bay, and these structures remain in the park today.
Far from making black and white statements about the plants we value and those we revile, van der Drift wants to celebrate the resilience of plant species, to acknowledge that – depending on our experiences – we will have different memories and associations with them. This exhibition asks us to consider what it means to take care of the whenua at a time when there is a growing awareness of the harmful impact of chemicals on humans and nonhumans, and simultaneously the realisation that we need to control introduced plants, which vastly outnumber and threaten the existence of native flora.
Much like the American artist Richard Misrach, who trusted in aesthetic beauty to draw attention to an ugly subject when he photographed a heavily polluted segment of the Mississippi River for his book Petrochemical America, van der Drift gently alerts us to the changing ways in which humans have occupied the landscape. Her images are hopeful, asserting that change is possible – with the eradication of introduced species and the re-establishment of endemic plants, Waitawa Regional Park will flourish, becoming a place of nurture and renewal for humans and nonhumans alike.
Essay by Dr Virginia Were
This exhibition is being showcased as part of the Auckland Festival of Photography 2025
Notes
(1) Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, Nils Bubandt. Eds. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press, 2017. G2
(2) Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, Nils Bubandt. Eds. G6
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