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Motutapu

In Motutapu, is a reference my home country of Aotearoa/New Zealand. I first came to the Matukutuki Valley, as with most of my wanderings, by chance. I do not know what led me there only that the region has drawn in artists for some time. These feelings were clear.

The quiet of the open land and Korimako's birdsong for company. James K Baxter is a renowned poet that lived and died in New Zealand. He wrote 'Letter from the Mountains' in which the first passage goes some way to describing the ease of life outside, away, nestled into the land. 

Motutapu I, Otago, New Zealand, 2007.  800mm (H) x 1970mm (W)  Edition of 9. © Alan McFetridge

 
 

Project Gallery

Motutapu, , New Zealand.

 
 

Letter from the Mountains - James K. Baxter


There was a message. I have forgotten it.
There was a journey to make. It did not come to anything.
But these nights, my friend, under the iron roof
Of this old rabbiters' hut where the traps
Are still hanging up on nails,
Lying in a dry bunk, I feel strangely at ease.
The true dreams, those longed-for strangers,
Begin to come to me through the gates of horn.


I will not explain them. But the city, all that other life
In which we crept sadly like animals
Through thickets of dark thorns, haunted by the moisture of women,
And the rock of barren friendship, has now another shape.
Yes, I thank you. I saw you rise like a Triton,
A great reddish gourd of flesh,
From the sofa at that last party, while your mistress smiled
That perfect smile, and shout as if drowning—
'You are always—'
Despair is the only gift;
When it is shared, it becomes a different thing; like rock, like water;
And so you also can share this emptiness with me.


Tears from faces of stone. They are our own tears.
Even if I had forgotten them
The mountain that has taken my being to itself
Would still hang over this hut, with the dead and the living
Twined in its crevasses. My door has forgotten how to shut.

 
Motutapu III, Otago, New Zealand, 2007. © Alan McFetridge

Motutapu III, Otago, New Zealand, 2007. © Alan McFetridge

Motutapu II, Otago, New Zealand, 2007. © Alan McFetridge

Motutapu II, Otago, New Zealand, 2007. © Alan McFetridge

 

True to the Last Cinder, 2016

Crude, Cataclysmic and … Manufactured? How the Horse River Fire continues to inform our upcoming monograph


You can read more about how disaster and aftermath are explored in Alan’s more recent photographic work in 2021, as well as how it is explored in an upcoming (2022) Monograph, Songs of the Dead.

 
 
 

For further information on this project please contact the Studio

All images © Alan McFetridge