Primary Products: John Johns, Jim Allen, Paratene Matchitt, Maddie Leach, Fiona Amundsen
Ruminations upon ‘the forest’ in Aotearoa New Zealand tend toward recollections of mighty kauri trees, of tui gorging on nectar, or perhaps of woody tourist staples: souvenir bowls, knotty wall clocks and rulers compiled from slivers of native timbers. ‘Primary Products’, an exhibition of work by John Johns, Jim Allen, Paratene Matchitt, Maddie Leach and Fiona Amundsen turns its gaze to the less romanticised terrain of exotic (or introduced) timber cultivation and its social, economic and ecological impact.
This is the second exhibition curated by Christina Barton since taking up the mantle of Director of the Adam Art Gallery, and its premise is particularly pertinent given the current attention directed at New Zealand forestry as a potential source of carbon credits to offset other industries associated with high carbon emissions (such as dairy farming).
The exhibition includes work from 1956 to 2007, but begins with One Shining Gum (Savia Brillante) (2006-07) by Maddie Leach, a work made for ‘Transversa’, an exhibition and conference in Santiago, Chile as part of The South Project. Uneasy about generating a quick-fire site-responsive project, Leach instead sought to make an ‘openly redundant gesture’, 2 shipping a felled pine tree from New Zealand to Chile—a country with its own abundant resources of pine. Stymied by strict bio-security guidelines vetoing any pine-based imports she sent a eucalypt (a permitted species) housed in a crate milled from the original pine tree she had secured. This ‘Trojan’ work made its way to Chile via Singapore and Hong Kong by ship, but arrived late and then sat at the port, refused entry by Chilean agriculture officers. The artist had to choose between the work being destroyed or returned to its