Ella Hickford - interview
Stranded
by Ella Hickford
Absolution Tattoo and Body Piercing
Christchurch
5 November - 1 December 2020
Interview by Sally Blundell for PhotoForum, 9 December 2020
Ella Hickford, Stranded, New Brighton, 2020
Stranded, the new exhibition by Christchurch photographer Ella Hickford, takes its name from a small piece of graffiti scrawled on a concrete wall under a bridge in Christchurch: ‘Mary Durkin - Stranded on a wet day’. It is one of three etched, painted or gouged surfaces presented in a remarkably raw, unmediated record of human intervention in the urban landscape.
Why were these words so important?
For me they speak to how people come be in these places and how the writing happens. It is not a place they have passed through – someone has spent a long time there, sitting quietly, being bored, writing things down. Mary, travelling through and stranded on a rainy day – it tells a little story. Or so-and-so loves so-and-so – who are these people? Are they still together? Do they still love each other? There are lots of these tiny little stories.
Some of those stories can be uncomfortable. The spray-painted swastika is quite confronting.
It’s there and I think it’s important to acknowledge that that underbelly of white supremacy is here in New Zealand. I definitely don’t agree with it, but it felt dishonest to remove something I found quite often. I have written to the city council to get those symbols removed whenever I have found them.
You posted an apology on Instagram for the inclusion of this image – why was this?
A complainant questioned mine and the studio's motives behind including the swastika, asserting that we were creating a safe haven for white supremacists, then went on to speculate that I painted the swastika myself, I wasn't being sympathetic to minorities, and that I was misguided by my white privilege. Everything was explained as clearly as it could be. Prior to putting up the exhibition I did consult with a friend of Sephardic Jewish descent as well as several people in the Fine Arts community, who acknowledged that my motives were clear and that including the image was important to the message of the exhibition – that graffiti of this kind is a reflection of society, and unfortunately, there are people in our communities who harbour these views. As a sort of documentary photographer, I was simply addressing what was in front of me at the time. I wrote the apology because I understood that despite my best intentions and attempts to get others’ input, some people were always going to read the message of the exhibition wrongly. I felt that I didn't clarify as explicitly as I could have the reasons for including the image in my artist statement shown alongside the images – I did think classifying them as ‘an attempt to lend weight to objectionable behaviour’ was enough but I doubted myself. This may be influenced by the fact I am Pākehā, but I thought the audience would inherently understand that white supremacy is unacceptable in any form. After conversation with (Absolution) we decided to remove the swastika image and replace it with the receipt I received after reporting the graffiti for removal. (1)
Your work also taps into a history of graffiti.
It does - graffiti goes back thousands of years. In Pompeii people have found political statements, advertisements, lewd comments, shopping lists. It’s a reflection of the society we live in. Modern graffiti, tagging, is a way of claiming your space, leaving a part of yourself there, letting people know you were there. When you take a holiday picture and stick it on Facebook you’re saying the same thing: I was here.
Ella Hickford, Stranded, Rapaki Bay, 2020
Your previous landscape work alludes to that same human connection with, and impact on, the environment beginning with Hope Street, related to Christchurch, and then your later series based around the Waimakariri River.
Ella Hickford, Hope Street, Avon Heathcote Estuary, 2017
My interest in the environment came from feeling displaced when I first moved to Christchurch. Hope St was a way of finding a connection with Christchurch through my Dad’s relationship with the places in the city. The Waimakariri series were about my relationship with the natural environment. Growing up in Hokitika, we spent a huge amount of time camping and tramping. On the West Coast there’s a lot of bush – you are much more in touch with nature than you are here. So it was about turangawaewae – finding a place to stand, to connect to.
Ella Hickford, The Ground You Walk On, Waimakariri Gorge Bridge, 2019
And the Waimakariri River was one of those places?
Yes. I wanted a place where you can go out into nature and feel cut off from the rest of the world. And in the past, if you were an explorer or colonial settler and wanted to get to the West Coast, you would go up the Waimakariri and its tributaries, through the passes and come back down near the Arahura River. So it was a connection to the West Coast, a link back to where I am from.
References to the Waimakariri inevitably raise issues of environmental degradation – is this also what interested you?
When I first started working on the Waimakariri stuff I was very concerned about water quality – I took a lot of photos of paddocks going straight into the river and that sort of thing. But the more time I spent there the more it became about my relationship with the landscape and my experience of place. It became a lot more subtle. Up in the hills near Arthurs Pass you get a very different sense of the river – untouched and beautiful. It is the image we try and put out to the world but it doesn’t speak so much to what New Zealand is like now. I like the Waimak because you get the holiday makers, people taking their dogs for a walk, desire lines – it’s very much linked to the old kiwi way of life with the bach, hanging out by the river, going fishing.
Ella Hickford, The Ground You Walk On, Old Man's Beard, 2019
Desire lines – what are these?
Along the river there will be a specific track or pathway but there’s also all these lines people take down the river. You have to have a few hundred people walking over them with the same inherent desire to make them. I love the term. It’s a form in the landscape but it’s also shows that desire to go to places where people feel something.
The landscapes in Stranded are fringe, coastal suburbs – are there desire lines here too?
I think so. People are drawn to certain places for whatever reasons. I came across graffiti from the 1870s on the Waimak Gorge bridge, a concrete wall where people carved their names. It’s the same as modern graffiti or tagging, people are drawn to places where it is going to show up, where others will see it. The Waimakariri work became about me being in that place. Stranded is about other people trying to find their place, wanting to feel they belong there.
In both environments you focus on the aftermath of people in the landscape, rather than the people themselves.
I am interested in people but I do not like photographing people – sometimes from a distance but I have never been someone to say, stand here, do this. I have quite bad social anxiety so it is a way to interact with people without actually being anywhere near people.
Ella Hickford, Hope Street, Selwyn Huts, 2017
Was photography always your preferred medium?
When I first went to university, it was all about painting but in that first year photography really clicked with me. I loved the way you could get out and go for a three-day walk up the Waimak and create something, whereas with painting I felt I would go out, take photos and then paint something in a studio – I didn’t really enjoy that. For our first project we were supposed to find a place in Christchurch that we called home and photograph that. I had just moved here so I photographed my grandparents’ house up on the Port Hills that had been damaged in the earthquakes. It was very nostalgic - it was a place I went to a lot as a child and it was a nice way to connect to my grandparents.
Ella Hickford, Hope Street, Fox Glacier, 2017
What sort of camera do you use?
A Canon 80D – it’s a good student-level camera and it mostly does what I need it to. I shoot almost fully digital because I take so many photos. You can’t afford to use film when you’re taking 300 pictures at any one time. I used to be worse – the first year I worked on the Waimakariri I had close to 8000 images. I would go out and take photos and take photos and take photos. I would get up before sunrise and stay until it got pretty dark, so it was definitely about me spending a lot of time there.
The photographs in this exhibition are large, unmatted, unframed and unglazed – the result is incredibly real and tactile.
I wanted them to be super flat, so you can get close and read what people have written. And I like it being just the image so there’s nothing else to read but the image itself. There is a saying I heard from a painting student about the framing of images creating either windows or walls. I wanted to make quite immersive works and I think if you had a frame or a matt it would be something else, an object rather than a window to the content.
Sally Blundell is a freelance journalist / writer / editor from Ōtautahi/Christchurch.
(1) Because of the potential of a swastika image to cause distress, Ella Hickford and PhotoForum have decided not to display the work.