FIXED for good

For this work we would like to produce a photographic series depicting plants that are native to the Waitemat? coastline and listed in Auckland Council's various planting guides. Individual plants will be selected from these lists and frozen solid. The resulting images of saplings encased in ice will be reproduced with a high level of detail and displayed in a lane that runs behind Sanford Seafood's ice-making facility in Wynard Quarter.

By selecting from the Council's planting catalogues our work references the amount of consideration that goes into urban planting and landscape designs such as Wynyard Quarter. Here, Megan Wraight and her collaborators have used native and local plants with a restorative ambition. The plants are integrated into the new environment to act as a filtration system for storm water. However, they needed to be contained in concrete trenches to shield their root systems from ground contaminated from a history of heavy industry in the area.

Sitting alongside these burgeoning plantings our photos of frozen saplings will appear as if under the clear, even light of a laboratory, alluding to scientific preservation efforts such as plant cryonics and seed banks. Despite this aura of preservation, the process of freezing has the opposite effect on the plants. They are unable to draw upon the water frozen around them and the extreme cold is eventually fatal.

Photographs themselves are often seen as frozen moments. They stop time and reduce it to a fixed instant, a permanent suspension of life that acts as a form of preservation. As such, the work captures our present ecological moment, poised between remembering the past and all that has been lost and facing the future and our ongoing struggle against further environmental damage.

Your contribution to our project will go towards printing and display costs.