The New Sun

Caroline McQuarrie

11 February – 13 March 2021

Jhana Millers, Wellington

Reviewed by Mary-Jane Duffy for PhotoForum

Up the stairs of the New Zealand Racing Conference building to Jhana Miller’s Gallery. It’s a Saturday in February and I have a tour group with me. We’ve just walked from the Star Gossage exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts. It’s cool and quiet in the gallery after the Saturday morning bustle of the CBD on what has turned into a hot day. The exhibition we are here to see is The New Sun by Wellington artist Caroline McQuarrie. She has been making work since the 1990s and has shown in many public galleries, but this is her first exhibition in a dealer gallery.

Galleries are often havens of stillness, but this exhibition seems to bring its own quietude. Around the walls photographs and embroidered text works sit alongside each other—sometimes as pairs but also grouped by medium. Each photograph is an image of a landscape—lushly green, richly dark or the colours of tussocky marshland. Their mystery draws me in. I’m not sure what I’m looking at. The images contain piles of rocks that wind through the landscape like a great wall, holes in the ground covered in wire mesh, ancient wooden structures, a shiny mountain, river rocks.

In complete contrast, the text works are hand embroidered on linen in the manner of a ‘sampler’. Each sampler contains text in what seems to be a series of diary entries:

It seems you spend every waking

moment washing his clothes. In the cold

water from the small creek you scrub

and scrub. In the cold months your

fingers feel raw, the skin broken. But

every day he comes home again, tired ,

hungry and dirty. And every morning

he dresses again for work in fresh,

clean clothes.

These two different types of work face off around the gallery space—their differences so distinct and their relationship full of tension: the stories of one or multiple women settlers embroidered on linen in complete contrast to colour photographs of the tailings, provisional structures and scars that are the legacy of the gold and quartz mining industries. This is a bold approach.

The story of the mining industry in Aotearoa New Zealand is well documented and sits amongst the colonial settler narratives. We know about the locations of gold and quartz mining settlements in Otago, Southland, Nelson, Marlborough, Westland, the Coromandel, Bay of Plenty and Waikato; about equipment and the methods used. Less documented are the humans involved—the men who moved half-way across the world with the glint of gold dust in their eyes, and the women who accompanied or followed them. These men and women sought economic prosperity inaccessible in their home countries and were driven to take risks and launch into the unknown to pursue those. As Heather Galbraith notes in the essay that accompanies the exhibition these pursuits were “Brutal for the ecology of the land, brutal for the iwi and hapu who were displaced from the land through confiscation or ‘purchase’, and brutal for the miners engaged in perilous and back-breaking activity.”

If little is known of the men—who they were, where they were from and how they survived the hardships of mining in isolated and rugged regions—almost nothing is known of the women. They left little in the way of record, whereas the activities of their fathers, husbands and sons are writ large on the landscape in the strange rock piles, channels, holes in the ground, sluice mountains and tunnels. We may not know who the men were, but the evidence of their presence in the landscape remains. The women have to be imagined.

In this exhibition Caroline employs the two aspects of her practice—photography and textiles—to draw attention to the two different types of experiences and stand in for masculine and feminine spaces. The tension posed by conceptualising the exhibition in these two disparate media underpins the exhibition—the complicated economic forces of colonisation that left massive scars on the landscape, and the necessity of having to imagine the women who lived amongst it because their lives were lived outside of that economic sphere. The photographs draw our attention to land history and the textiles to the absence of women from the record—both crucial parts of our colonial legacy that continue to have impact.

I wondered about coming to this exhibition cold without the essay or Jhana and Caroline’s insights. How would I make sense of the exhibition? It offers two very different lenses—the imagined voices of women present via the embroideries and the photographs of the sites abandoned by an industry long gone and moved onto bigger things.

I’m not sure I would have made total sense of it. But after reading all the sampler texts and then looking at the photographs, I understood that the texts frame the exhibition. Through their lens so much can be visualised and heard, and those ghostly voices remained in my head when I looked at the photographs. Fool’s Gold, Tailings, Black Sand, Mine Shaft, Flume Trestles. Their enigma fell away as I read the labels. I returned several times to Tunnel (2013) to enjoy the velvety greens of the mossy tunnel and the glinting surfaces of Sluiced hills (2016). I was looking at the terrible beauty of land history highlighted by the artist with composition, colour and focus.

To quote Heather Galbraith again “…the process of figuring out who we are now is deeply reliant on how we got here and whose histories and legacies we carry with us.” Beneath the quiet surface of this exhibition multiple narratives are at work—narratives about how we arrived at some of the problems we now experience as a nation, around land degradation, the displacement of tangata whenua, and the valuing of women. This exhibition highlights the importance of continuing to research, call attention to and unpack our colonial history.

Mary-Jane Duffy is a writer, ziner and art fiend. She leads monthly Art Explore tours in Wellington, is a former art gallery owner and has written for Art New Zealand, PhotoForum, Fishhead, Eye Contact as well as numerous exhibition catalogues.