Melissa Macleod lies across a flood-prone track in the Avon Heathcote Estuary, her body forming an inadequate temporary barrier. The track is close to where Melissa lives in New Brighton and over the last decade she has made several works relating to how the area was affected by the 2010/11 Canterbury earthquakes.

The extreme ground movement altered the structure of the land, leaving much of it increasingly vulnerable to flooding, a risk further heightened by climate change. Macleod’s solitary action is an expression of her frustration that a remedy has not been prioritised, and an acknowledgment of our collective human responsibility to protect the whenua.

(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )

Composition for Two Planes uses Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū’s base isolation system as a framework to think about fluidity, the potential for movement, and the notion of staying with something difficult or troubling. The base isolators were installed under the Gallery after the 2010 and 2011 Canterbury earthquakes; by decoupling the building from the ground they allow a slow, rolling movement during an earthquake. A common way to depict anticipated movement is through a choreographic or musical score, a set of instructions for performers to interpret. Adopting the idea of the score here, Ella Sutherland speculates on the Gallery’s seismic future, how it might move with any turbulence, suggesting this could be conceptual as well as physical movement.

(Die Cuts and Derivations, 11 March – 2 July 2023)