Jan 20th 2018 – March 10 2019
Mark Graver – Imagined & Remembered Places
Jan 20 – March 8 2019
‘Real images are engravings, for it is the imagination that engraves them on our memories. They deepen the recollections we have experienced, which they replace, thus becoming imagined recollection’
Gaston Bachelard, – ‘The Poetics of Space ‘first published 1958, trans. Maria Jolas, Boston, Beacon Press 1969 p. 32
A series of ‘landscapes’ based around images of places and spaces visited, recorded, imagined and remembered. The works began by re-visiting photographs and sketches made at a particular time in a particular place. They are layered, much in the way memories are, and manipulated – things come to the fore, emerge then disappear. Technically there is a relationship to working with moving image and layered video and some images could be regarded as ‘film stills’. The addition of scanned sketches and digital drawing intends to reference the time and place as recorded on paper and remembered on screen.
INTRODUCED BIRDS 2018
I remember walking down the road in Kerikeri one day and seeing a flash of orange from a blackbird’s beak. I remember as a child having to come in from playtime and go to bed when it was still light outside and listening to the blackbird’s song. A memory of place. The nostalgia of sound.
As an immigrant to New Zealand I can understand why the European colonisers brought their birds, and while there is a connection to personal memory of place and time, childhood summers, bird song and to the nostalgic pieces of ‘home’ these birds, brought by European settlers, could also be signifiers of physical and environmental colonisation.
AS KINGFISHERS CATCH FIRE 2019
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
A new series exploring connections and correspondences between memory and sound.
There are many Kingfishers around Wharepuke and I have been recording their noises – the monotonous, monotone screeching and the strange warbling that chicks make in their nests – to make samples which are currently being mixed for sound works.
I don’t remember many of the poems we had to study at school for my A Level English but As Kingfishers Catch Fire by Gerard Manley Hopkins has always stayed with me at least in part.
These works are intended to add a visual component to the thoughts and memories conjured up by the sight and sounds of the birds and the connection to the poem.
