KATE VAN DER DRIFT

Directional Listening: Fluvial Field Notes

22nd of October - 11th of November 2019

Thigh deep in soft mud, stuck but not sinking further. I lay in rest and mused at the ridiculousness of this situation. If a farmer came past now they would assume I’m stranger than they already do. 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]”

Kate van der Drift’s new exhibition Directional Listening: Fluvial Field Notes is a continuation of inquiry into the fragile ecology and transformation of the Hauraki Plains. Hauraki was once New Zealand’s largest wetland complex and has been almost entirely transformed since colonisation by land drainage and Kahikatea logging.

A series of new experimental camera-less works, Directional Listening: Fluvial Field Notes are river exposures attempting to picture the inside of water.

[1] Hurd, Barbara. Listening to the Savage: River Notes and Half-Heard Melodies Athens, Georgia : The University of Georgia Press. 2016. Pp 34