Reflections on my residency at Auckland Botanic Gardens, Summer 2023

My time as Artist in Residence at the Auckland Botanic Gardens started in December 2022, with a retrospective exhibition, a selection of works from the last 20 years. The most recent  works were from my 2022 exhibition at Föenander Gallery. The exhibition represented various directions I’ve taken over the years including frottage pieces and silver leaf images.

Alongside the retrospective, I set up an open studio in the gallery space available to me, and started work on the project I’d proposed to the Gardens for my residency. My intention was to be as open about the process of creating art as possible, and the open studio provided a rare chance for visitors to see an artist at work.

The Garden’s theme for Summer 2022-23 was ‘Taking A Closer Look…’ which aligned well with my own ideas for the residency.  The proposal was to build a ‘portrait’ of details of the Gardens and more specifically a portrait of a path that I had chosen through the Gardens.

My journey began in the Pa Harakeke area, through the Native Trees section to the Huakaiwaka Visitors Centre, then onto the Conifers, the Cactus Rock Garden, Potter Children’s Garden, the Roses and then the Palms.

The process involved walking and soaking up the visual feast of the Gardens, taking photographs of the forms and patterns that gave a sense of place specific to each area.

I tend to take a lot of photographs and over the duration of my residency I took around 2500. 

I reviewed the images and selected those that jumped out as potentially useful in the project, then printed them out and manually cropped images further to distil the forms, colour and patterns so that they became representative but not necessarily obvious.

I had decided to create a series of works on A2 paper that would hang together in a grid following the geographical line of my journey. 

I wanted to use the time here to explore materials and techniques I hadn’t used in recent years, and to get back into drawing, to get ‘loose’ with my techniques and see what effect that would have on my work.  

I rediscovered how much I love charcoal drawing, something I hadn’t done since my years at art school. I mixed techniques and materials together to see how they worked in a single panel and experimented with hanging the works in different orders to explore how they related and reacted to each other.

I arranged the paper works gradually, as each was finished, adding them from right to left along a large wall in the Visitors Centre foyer, an area slightly separated from my workspace.  As I was working I would invite the people who stopped to chat with me to take a look at the project as it progressed, and let me know their thoughts.

The work inspired many and varied conversations about art and botany, I liked it when people recognised the details from plants they’d seen in the gardens and how they would often say it made them see the plants in a different way. For example my rose works, “why did you paint just the stems?” was a common question usually followed by how interesting and varied they realised the thorns actually are. These visitors come from Aotearoa and all over the world. They represent a diverse cross-section of society and my interaction with the visitors was one of the most enjoyable and important elements of my time there.

I felt equally positive about my interactions with the Gardens staff, who were encouraging and supportive of my residency. Working alongside the large team there was a stark difference to working alone in my art studio at home. I was energised by their enthusiasm.

The resulting work, a combination of 60 individual A2 pieces, was a direct reaction to the Gardens. It is a reflection of the Gardens own diversity, an eclectic selection of botanical specimens gathered into various curated areas. The work contains a greater variety of images than I have grouped together before, varied and interesting in their combinations. 

My time at the Gardens opened up new avenues of exploration for me which is what I had hoped the residency would do.

I will continue to visit, to gather reference and inspiration from the Gardens, and would highly recommend the residency to any artists working in the field of botanical art.