Jane Zusters - Is There Anybody Home

Essay by Andrew Paul Wood for Takahe Magazine

August 7, 2018

For beauty to work, there must be a surface capable of receiving the wound.
― Timothy Morton, Realist Magic

Born and living in Christchurch once more , Jane Zusters has had a chequered art career. These days she makes site-specific work responding to contemporary events juxtaposing the human with the natural world creating environmental discourses exploring that uneasy edge where humans co-opt or entangle with eco -systems. see www.janezusters.co.nz

In the event of beauty, a non-self part of my inner space seems to resonate in the colours on the wall, in the sounds pouring into my ears. Hugely amplified, might this resonance actually kill me? “A beautiful way to die” – to be destroyed by vibrations that removed myself from myself.
― Timothy Morton, Realist Magic

The River Avon is the name the Deans family gave it when they arrived from Scotland in the early 1840s. In te reo Māori it is Ōtākaro, “the place of a game”, named for the children who played on the river’s banks while the adults gathered bountiful food – pātiki (flounder), ducks, Inaka (whitebait), native trout and tuna (eels), a mahika kai (food gathering place) for Waitaha, who were permanently settled at Puari Pā, and later seasonally by Kāti Māmoe and Kāi Tahu. The river runs through what is now known by the locals as the “Red Zone” from which the inhabitants were cleared after the 22 February 2011 Christchurch Earthquake. About thirty homes are still there, their owners uninsured and refused adequate compensation for their homes.

Read full essay at Takahe Magazine