Abstract:
The second part of an elegy to my mother, who died of Alzheimer’s in 2016, Kerosene Creek explores my childhood memories of geothermal landscapes and watery environments in the Taupo Volcanic Zone in the central North Island. It’s also a way for me to work through my grief. By photographing a single model who ‘stands in’ for my mother and myself in this landscape, I’ve constructed a family past that is part fact and part fiction. Fashioned from photographs, videos and texts combined in hybridised forms, this hypothetical family past is personal because these landscapes embody my memories of long-ago family holidays; universal because the landscapes I’ve focused on hold the key to the question of how life first evolved on Earth 3.4 billion years ago.