11 August - 28 August 2017

By Ellie Lee-Duncan

Happenstance & Purlieus
Curated by Laree Payne

Hamilton’s Skinroom Gallery hosted the Auckland artist couple, Kohl Tyler-Dunshea and Harry McAlpine, in an exhibition using both rooms of the gallery space. McAlpine’s large photographs and performative video works were showcased in the front room and dystopian in content; Tyler-Dunshea’s soft botanical watercolours were hung in the back room.

The delicate watercolours of plants and flowers in Tyler-Dunshea’s Purlieus captured me instantly. They are devoid of backgrounds, which at once focuses one’s attention solely on the details of each plant, but displaces them from a spatial context. Rather than sharp definition of their linear elements, the softness of the works creates a hazy indistinctness, which seems to be partially from the wet-on-wet technique that she utilised.

This botanical arrangement of flowers has roots in scientific observation, categorised into meticulous arrangements. They are also segmented with slits of negative space, mimicking tape marks such as one may find within a book of pressed specimens. These conventions transform the plants into objects of scientific examination. However, the lack of linear detail resists this interrogative gaze, preserving something mysterious about them.

The first, largest work we encounter is Rhabdothamnus Solandri Cuttings collected in 1826. The plant was named after the naturalist Daniel Solander, who was a member of Cook’s voyages to Aotearoa. In her research on him Tyler-Dunshea read The Endeavour Journal of Sir Joseph Banks, who worked alongside Solander.

Banks and Solander were witness to a murder of a tangata whenua chief by their men, who died on the 8th October 1769. He was the first recorded death of a Maaori individual described in this journal. Banks and Solander, so careful in studying and naming plants, left this man unnamed. Instead, he was described only briefly, with more attention recorded to the weave of his korowai than his personhood.

The painting, therefore, layers the beauty of an appropriated and repainted image with the reality of the structural injustice of colonisation and the indifference of the recorders. Tyler-Dunshea discussed the overlaying tensions of the plants; “Plants harbour certain histories—they move throughout the world in the same way that people do… However, objectively they’re just plants, and it’s people who choose to project ideas onto them.”(1)

Florrilegia are books of pressed plants which catalogued all the noteworthy species on an estate, specifically ‘exotic’ or rare plants. Creating florilegia was a practice commissioned only by the wealthy and elite, as a form of sophisticated bragging of plant ownership. As such, even these ‘natural’ archives of individuals’ estates and gardens were complicit (if tacit) in histories of colonial violence and land confiscation throughout the British Empire. The plants would be removed from their site, from their original place in the biosphere and their larger native ecosystem, to the unnatural, inhospitible estates of the British elite, pressed between the bleached, papyrus-like pages of the family Florilegium.

Tyler-Dunshea’s series of works Environ #1-5 are painted florilegium compositions, inspired by postcolonial methodology and work towards recontextualising plants within their uncultivated natural niche. She sources her subjects within her property at Titirangi, near an area of bush reserve. One work, Environ #2, featured nasturtium, drooping spleenwort, totara, and babies’ tears. As such, these plants have largely grown wildly, and are assembled in these compositions as evidence of the operation of natural systems, not despite it...Curated by Laree Payne, the exhibitions carved into ideas of ownership and access; the consequences of political decisions imprinted on both bodies and the land itself. 

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(1) Conversation with the writer, Skinroom Gallery, Hamilton, 11 August 2017

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Read the review on Eyecontact here.