Exhibition text for “Legacy Issues: Lens-Based Investigations of Waitaha Canterbury Whenua” - a kōrero with Emily Lazare

Feat: MITCHELL BRIGHT /CONOR CLARKE /ELLA HICKFORD /MOANA LEE /MIKE O’KANE /TIM J. VELING HANNAH WATKINSON - Ashburton Art Gallery, 27 April - 14 June, 2024

// \\ piki, heke (or “floundering with friends” - exhibition text for Peaks and Troughs - Conor Clarke and friends, Jonathan Smart Gallery, Aug 18 - Sept 16, 2023

Rupture

We go to the shores of the lagoon to look for sharks’ teeth; the dark and tiny fossils wink amidst the sand and shell rubble and the washed up weed that is too green to look at for too long.  Wind doesn’t want us there.  Wind pushes our hair into our eyes, our mouths, fills our ears with the sound of going home.  He wades to the depth where the water begins to invade his gumboots.  He wants it in there and doesn’t want it in there; knew what would happen and let it happen.  He looks at me – his eyes asking for something I do not have; for something I would like to give him but can’t.

Sometimes there is no going back.

They don’t say “I’m going down the lake to look for sharks’ teeth” here; they say “I’m going sharks’ teething”.  It is its own thing, understood.  And most who live here have a story of a rare find or know someone else’s story of a rare find and both of these they will share with you if you are lucky; if you are luckier still, you might even get to hold those polished morsels of local gold whose once-sharp edges might now fit snuggly in the hollow of your hand.  Their shape and weight and age are things we marvel at: they are delicate and heavy at once; they are smooth and scarless, charcoal-coloured ruptures in time.   Over numerous visits, I have found a few of their tiny counterparts and plucked them from the shore.  Some now reside in the ashtray of the slowly-rusting truck as proof for other visitors should their searches be fruitless.  See, we will say, offering them up.  They’re there.  They’re everywhere once you get an eye for them.   

If you listen carefully, you can hear them dance within their confines, harmonious with the sounds of shingle, the popping and sliding going on beneath us.

At night, I picture the many small, grey arrowheads pointing; the thousands of tiny claw-like remnants poised in their places on mantelpieces and bookshelves, and the ones collectively gathering dust inside pāua shell receptacles; the others kept safe inside jewellery boxes beside rings passed down and lonely earrings missing their twins.  

I don’t wonder so much about why this place in particular, I wonder more about the what-ifs – the running out of things.   Words like “fossick” and “accumulation” and “collection” are hard to think about – harsh to say – even when they’re whispered.  I think about the strangeness of it all: this remote and windswept repository I too have thought fit to rummage through; the rattling of relics inside a plastic cage; the water lingering still, in the bottom of our boots. 

This is the lasting image preventing sleep: close up – the lonely tooth of a long-dead shark lying in a velvet-lined box; zoom out – and there are rows and rows and rows of them, always another to take another’s place, the uniform and polished wooden boxes, the velvet lining in deepest blue; the teeth, the teeth, the teeth.

Originally published in Stasis Journal 2021