This Place opening event, Steel Galley, Franklin Arts Centre, 10/12/22, Photo courtesy of Arts Diary
This Place
This place is a group exhibition bringing to the foreground diverse ways of belonging and connecting to a place. Concentrating on Pukekohe and the wider South area, Sonja Drake, Sandra Littlejohns-Clark and Kellie Masiutama focus on places, people, memories, and histories of personal significance. Coming from a range of perspectives they reflect on the environmental and social impacts and their whakapapa to a place.*
*reproduced from the gallery room sheet
This Place exhibition, over 200 responses rolled out across the Gallery -photo credit Nectar Photography
This Place, Responses
As part of my involvement in This Place, I was keen to include a way for visitors to the exhibition to respond to these concepts, and add their own stories, so we set up two questions and a way for visitors to respond. I was blown away by the over 200 responses we received, and wanted to create artwork from these to share with the community. Reading through the responses as I cut them out, I was struck by the diversity of where people have come from to this area, the breadth of the personal histories, and the feelings shared. Respondents speak of a wide and moving range of experience and history, from how their GG grandmother was ‘blackbirded’ from the island she grew up on at the age of 14, to experiences of the Second World War, the flooding, another relates a Maori proverb relating to the area, and one I particularly loved about how their Dad worked cutting down the trees, now he plants them.
With Thanks - kindly supported and funded by The Franklin Local Board