I feel that the best project I finished this year was my Lens project, at least in my eyes. The corresponding Powhiri concept was ‘Hakari’. Hakari is the final stage of the process, in which things are balanced, settled and resolved. It is the resolution and celebration of what has taken place.
My assignment was to take one of my previous studios and re-imagine it through the medium of photography. I eventually came to the conclusion that I was going to recreate my Turangawaewae project, taking various images of the city with a natural element within them, representing my transition from a rural background to the now man-made structural city. In my work, I worked with framing the images with a natural ‘halo’, attempting to capture a balanced relationship that really represents my experience in a natural environment and how that experience affects how I see the world I’m currently in. In light of this concept, I named my series “Vantage”.
When it comes to gender or indigeneity in my lens project, it is almost completely irrelevant, as my entire project is based around my own personal experiences of what I consider to be my home, and my view of the city as an environment. However, at a stretch, I could perhaps link the ideas of indigeneity from Linda Smith’s “Decolonising Methodologies” to how I see my home, and where I believe I feel that home is, however the main concept of indigenous in this reading is that “It is a term that internationalises the experiences, the issues and the struggles of some of the world’s colonised peoples.”, of which I am not. It is important to keep such ideas in mind, but it’s really only specific to work being created that affects, or is affected, by said ideas.
Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Introduction. Decolonising methodologies – Research and indigenous peoples. London and New York – Zed Books, 2012, 1-18..pdf