Land (Im)Balance

Summer 2022

In collaboration w Lateral Office

Exhibited at the Victoria University of Wellington

The installation borrows soil from different parts of Aotearoa (New Zealand) that represent different land types, each tied to various uses and activities. The installation was an opportunity to learn about the pressures land faces in Aotearoa and became an implicit dialogue with the issues faced in Canada in which developmental, extractive, and exploitative pressures shape the built environment. Each soil collection is tied to a story, sometimes highly personal, sometimes standing in for a regional or even national issue. The soils are held in transparent cylinders suspended above the ground. A series of forces, modeled on cork disks, which are local, regional, and global, and that act upon whenua, serve as counterbalances to the soil. These forces are represented as stories about the land. Visitors can observe and participate in the complex impact of negotiating these forces through a rope and pulley network suspended in the atrium at the Wellington School of Architecture