Blood in the backblocks

By MALCOLM BURGESS

Photography runs in John Collie's veins. Or is that developing fluid? Besides preparing for his solo show, Life Blood, at Te Tuhi-The Mark, he also lectures on the medium at the Manukau Institute of Technology, works there as a photographic technician, and has trekked through India as a photojournalist. Then there's an anti-GM march this weekend, where he'll be taking pictures for Greenpeace.

For Collie, art, politics, work and life mingle seamlessly along the wider spectrum of visible light.

So in which particular vein are the six large-format works that make up Life Blood meant to be considered? With titles like Green Desert/Dead Lamb, Silent Forest/Sheep Head, New Zealand Desert and Hanging Sheep, you'd expect fairly straightforward and descriptive fare. But despite the temptation to look at things that way, Collie is first and foremost wearing his artist hat when it comes to these works, not so much documenting nature as opening up iconic, powerful images for argument.

And while he sets the terms of reference for this artistic inquiry, he is not "selling" his concept as an advertiser would, but letting the viewer roam around these nostalgic windows at will.

That is not to say this Elam graduate is not averse to some digital manipulation to get his message across. He removed some of the vegetation in Green Desert/Dead Lamb, so a lone thistle becomes the focal point to resonate with the black eye of the dead lamb in the opposing photo.

Although he's keen for the works to speak for themselves, there is a lot of expository ephemera surrounding the exhibition to digest - in both Collie's talk and in the gallery notes. At the heart of Life Blood is the idea of the "green desert" and the interplay between how the nation sells itself as clean and green, yet has essentially destroyed the landscape through overfarming, deforestation and erosion.

"Presenting the notion of New Zealand as a green desert is my counterpoint to the myth that New Zealand is a clean green forgotten paradise," he says.

It's a timely topic, in that it asks the big question: how much is the notion of clean and green a con job and how much is central to our cultural identity?

While 50,000 distressed and unwanted sheep float in and out of the headlines on a faraway sea, Life Blood draws attention to a less-talked-about agricultural crisis adrift on our own oceans of green.

"The reality is endless miles of over-fertilised, barren and eroding grazing land populated by sheep and cattle," Collie says.

The subject matter calls to mind the black and white work of Peter Peryer, whose Dead Steer caused an uproar concerning our meat industry when it was exhibited in Germany.

But Collie says he was already dealing with this kind of imagery at that time in his own way.

Originally from Dunedin, he has spent a lot of time in Central Otago. Wandering the tussocky hills around Wanaka, finding dead sheep was a frequent occurrence. Indeed, he almost bumped into the strung-up carcass of Hanging Sheep while investigating some dried-up turnips in a field. "The dead sheep also raise questions about the fragmentation of forests, diminishing bio-diversity and our extinct native flora and fauna."

Collie chose the title, Life Blood, for several reasons - including farming's position as the lifeblood of the nation and the backbone of the economy.

"It also entails darker connotations in reference to the dead sheep. The metaphor is extended into the concept of life being sucked out of the land."

Even in areas that may look primordial, such as the beech forest depicted in Silent Forest, other less obvious losses have been incurred - the kind that photographs can't capture. While in South Westland, Collie says he noticed the forests were almost silent, unlike those described by Captain Cook as having been so loud with birdsong he couldn't hear himself speak from his ship moored in the harbour.

Collie has done much research into the subject's history. This included issues of colonisation and identity and "how we have given over vast swathes of lush forest to farming, thus transforming the native land into an antipodean Britain".

Like another photographic artist, Greta Anderson, Collie is making the leap from musical fame to the more visual kind. Photography is not such an unnatural progression from his former life as drummer for two well-known Kiwi bands - the Double Happys and Straitjacket Fits.

An album cover he did for the Verlaines featured a dead cow. With Life Blood, the idea seems to have found its way back to the foreground.

An activist as well as an artist, Collie is concerned about a way forward as much as documenting the damage. As such, he looks fondly towards the efforts of people such as Waipoua Forest Trust's Stephen King, whom he calls "a Kiwi Tom Bombadil".

This Lord of the Rings reference is ironic, he says. Despite the images that film trilogy sells to the world of an untouched landscape, "you have to drive through miles of farm to get to any of the areas depicted".

Exhibition

* What: Life Blood, by John Collie

* Where & when: Te Tuhi-The Mark, 13 Reeves Rd, Pakuranga, Oct 11-Nov 2