My practice which deploys analogue photographic methods assumes the position/perspective of a Pākehā settler woman documenting her own surroundings. I use modalities of performance and trace to phenomenologically examine this gendered role within the wider context of colonial New Zealand. I question how the domestic ‘homemaker’ is complicit in the acts of violence central to the wider ‘home-making’ project of colonisation. In these ways my practice considers what it means to be Tangata Tiriti as a relational identity to Tangata Whenua. “To be Pākehā, to fully inhabit that identity, is to be permanently oriented to Māori, as well as to know about our historical entanglements”[1]
My medium format camera becomes a silent witness to the lasting residues of these ‘historical entanglements’. The camera shifting from object to voyeur, capturing traces to phenomenologically document significant colonial sites- specifically settler cottages and museums and the surrounding whenua often blighted by Pākehā male labour. This silence felt in the images mirror the notion of complicity. Contact prints of the domestic and ephemeral are placed between remnants of agriculture and industry as trace markers of colonial violence. Homely objects such as, blankets, cushions, chinaware and hearths suddenly lose their neutrality, “not all acts of colonisation require picking up a gun.”[2]
[1] Alison Jones, This Pākehā life: An unsettled memoir (Wellington : Bridget Williams Books, 2020), 143.
[2] Shaw, Richard. “the unsettled, small stories of colonisation .” Massey University Press, 2024, p.102-103.