Abstract:
Avicennia marina australasica (henceforth referred to as Avicennia), is named for the species of grey mangrove indigenous to the North Island of Aotearoa. This species of mangrove inhabits the estuaries and catchments of the Tāmaki River in Tāmaki Makaurau. I conduct my Polaroid photography whilst standing in the sands of the Tāmaki estuary. I have grown up along this body of water and possess a deeply personal relationship to it, both physically and emotionally. I am drawn to mangroves as spaces and entities because of the hybridised position they occupy, and the ways in which they grow, migrate and reproduce. I perceive a defiance in the way they colonise space; their roots tightly pack fine silt, building their own land in which to take root. The mangrove’s systems form dense and impenetrable networks—barriers against vicious tides and canopies to shelter and foster other life. The mangrove seedling is a replica of the adult tree, released to drift on tidal currents until it finds conditions suitable for it to grow. This thesis draws from key texts that have informed my research undertaken this year, seeking to reconceive and reframe their ideas and artistic practice within distinctly biological, feminine and maternal frameworks. I view my research as akin to an assemblage of mangrove seedlings, each text growing and existing alone, and within an organic assemblage of philosophical theory, artistic discourse, embodied experience, science fiction and biological metaphors. Texts are open and incomplete, given agency to co-exist, contradict, intersect, influence, and evolve. Notions of openness and evolution are central to this thesis. I see reading as both a performative act and negotiation of space and time. I wish to move the reader between different states of experience, engagement and being. I place personal experience alongside critical discourse, pulling the reader into intimate personhood, and pushing them into wider and more expansive frameworks of theory. With the addition of each text, new ideas and experiences recontextualise what has already been read. In this sense, the thesis can be conceived as a generative and primordial space that facilitates the growth of other forms of knowledge and experience. I seek to create a hybridisation of explicitly personal ideas and artistic practice, juxtaposing oppositions in order to address the fertile spaces of potential I perceive between them.