HUT FOR A SENSUOUS GOLD MINER

SOPHIE BANNAN AND DAEGAN WELLS

MEANWHILE Gallery
Level 2, 99 Willis Street, Te Aro, Wellington

31 OCTOBER - 17 NOVEMBER 2018

This exhibition has two points of departure; two sites, similar but distinct, upon which scenes of nation building, homemaking, and resource extraction have played out and continue to play out. The first is Waiuta, a century ago the location of the South Island’s largest gold mine, now a ghost town. The other is an isolated dairy farm in coastal Southland. Together, Sophie Bannan and Daegan Wells use these sites to speculate upon methods of feeling through histories of place, and possibilities for inhabiting the present.

Waiuta acts as a kind of ‘test site’ for Sophie Bannan for a methodology the artist terms ‘ethnoarcheology,’ a process which involves recreating historical objects as a means of making contact with the people who may have used them and the lives they may have lived. For Hut for a Sensuous Gold Miner, Bannan has taken ecological and geological field samples from the town—gold, quartz, fungi and flora—and suspended them in candles. During the course of the show, these will burn down, changing form as they release fumes and scents, their structural integrity compromised as they melt away onto walls and floor of the gallery. Alongside these candles is a series of double-exposed photographs taken of Waiuta and the areas surrounding the town. Different views of Waiuta at different times of day are superimposed over each other, troubling the viewer’s ability to locate these scenes within a linear timeline of the place.