Listing Details
Landmarks
"My father moved away last year, not too far away but far enough that everything felt different. During a recent phone conversation, he admitted to feeling homesick for the shape, smell and colour of the landscape where he had lived most of his life. It reminded me of being overseas and being surprised by the continual ache I carried around like an extra backpack, this longing for the shape of the land. I remember trying to describe what it felt like when places on the river where I’d spent most of the best days of my life were no longer lovely places. Like if a church, the place where you felt safe and connected, was taken apart bit by bit until all that remained was rubble, the pages of the sacred books left blowing in the wind.
I realised I didn’t have a word to describe what my father was experiencing, this loss of a landscape as familiar and linked as the hallways of the family home.
There was an evening when I sat with my back against an ancient beech tree, the wind roaring in the canopy, the ground beneath me rising and falling with the movement of the tree pulling on is roots as a bird wove the last of the light into her song. These days on warm riverbeds, bodies curled around rocks, lying awake on the ground looking up through the leaves of an old poplar tree at the stars, these places within a familiar landscape are what we refer back to for the rest of our lives. What happens if these cairns, these riverbeds and wild empty places are taken away with a stroke of a pen and some fancy words on a document in a boardroom?
Because I couldn’t find a word, these small bronze works are my attempt to articulate an understanding and recognition of what my father was feeling when he went away and what we all feel when we go back to a loved place and find it gone."
Alison Erickson has lived and worked at The Mill Studio in Waikari, North Canterbury since 1998. She sculpts and casts bronze on the premises, with her partner, Sam Mahon.
Dimensions: 175mm W x 125mm D x 355mm H
Freight Note: Due to the size and nature of this work freight will be calculated post purchase.
