Wellington, April-May 2010
Reading and the thinking about the Box project, I was immediately interested, sceptical, as to the level of possible socio-cultural implication and investigation that the box was seeking to engage. Irrespective of an artist’s project, and in which country it might take place, I wondered how this Box — this void — might begin to engage complex intertwining notions of social and cultural fabric when its fleeting itinerary resembled more the tourist than the insider. But then — as the transitory, the assimilatory, spring-boards off the fixed as its defining element — I began to see that the Box itself was only a formality; that the space within it was where these conversations would begin, and indeed were already taking place.
My project posed a challenge to the Box: that the space within it might engage a sense of place through its basic premise of volume; that it might truly experience the New Zealand cultural landscape by becoming part of it; by doing the hard-yards and getting its hand dirty, as it were. For two months, the Box supported a small subtropical forest of native Nikau palms, typical of what the local ecology might support, while also token to the New Zealand identity as one of the more picturesque and easily digested elements of the proverbial Bush. The extent to which the forest would thrive would be a measure as to the Box’s ability to become acquainted and integrated with its environment. But more widely, the project looked to assume and implicate the dynamics of contemporary New Zealand ecology as a malleable, void space; a metaphorical framework for considering and putting into motion post-national ideas of social and cultural makeup.
The forest was shifted between numerous domestic, public, indoor and outdoor locations, spending time also in transit.
