The Artist Using Collage To Make You Think About The Earth

When Teresa HR Lane first moved from Auckland to a 12-hectare retired sheep farm in Matauri Bay 18 months ago, friends questioned how she’d fill her days.

Warm and naturally chatty, Teresa herself also wondered how she’d cope.

Eighteen months on, she laughs at the notion of boredom. She and her partner, who is responsible for “luring” her north, have spent the past month regenerating the property by planting 400 mānuka trees, yet the seedlings haven’t quite made the visual impact she might have liked for all that back-breaking work.

Having moved on from working in the visual effects department on the New Zealand-shot The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power TV show, the prolific artist is now focused on preparing for her next exhibition, Here For Ages.

She has also quashed what could have been an isolating existence by joining a raranga (flax-weaving) group called Te Whare Pora o Whangaroa, who are collectively creating a korowai.

The experience of learning the craft has been humbling and enriching, she says, and has given her a greater appreciation of the communion between Māori and Pākehā in the region, as well as an education on how to propagate, care for and respect a plant that can be used, with as little waste as possible, for other significant purposes.

“I pinch myself daily,” she says, over a coffee during a brief visit to Auckland. “How did I end up here with these incredible women? They’re sharing this very precious knowledge with me, which fills my boots and replenishes my energy.”

Her fascination with natural resources was just as evident in Viva Magazine Volume Seven, our quarterly edition guest-edited by Lorde, in which two of Teresa's collage and paint works accompanied an essay by documentary maker Sharron Ward.

The piece questioned whether New Zealand is getting the balance right between development and conservation, as do Teresa’s striking pieces, with superimposed nude figures with native birds.

Her new body of work takes the idea of guardianship a step further. The self-proclaimed “amateur biologist” has led her to ask many questions in her art and life namely, how do we manage water? Where does the water go? How does it impact other people after it flows from her farm at the top of the hill?

“An element of farming, historically, was that the end of your fence is where your boundary ends. Well, it doesn’t work like that,” she says. “Because we’re all connected.”

READ: Artist George Watson On Butterflies, Agriculture & Reimagining Mansfield

Here For Ages examines the landscape and our place in it, the way agriculture has shaped and changed it through time, and asks whether our collective snapshot of our own country is indeed accurate.

Each night Teresa says she'd sit on her couch and pore through old op-shop copies of History of New Zealand, Atlas of New Zealand, Wild New Zealand and Natural World of New Zealand, landscape photography taken from what were once treasured coffee table books, "exquisite pieces of art that are now washed up in junk shops".

She’d tear out certain colours and textures, but also images that represent what we perceive to be beautiful.

“The colours we associate with New Zealand are interesting,” she explains. “The green we think of as home is completely artificial. It’s superphosphate, the fertiliser that makes it that green."

“I remember sitting on the beach, looking at the landscape on the headland, and seeing this incredible olive, then the bush enveloping the headland in a really beautiful way. Then suddenly there’s a pine forest, all pointy and jagged, and you realise, that doesn’t belong.”

Her work until now has examined people, identity and gender through collage, or “painting with paper, and drawing with scissors”, a medium she initially turned to for frugal reasons, but has since proved to be an eye-opening anthropological exercise.

Just as it was virtually impossible to find figures in earlier magazines that represent our ethnic diversity, finding accurate representations of our landscape has been equally problematic.

New Zealand has a history of showcasing itself in a misleading way, says Teresa, stemming back to early paintings, in which artists would include English trees to entice Brits Downunder.

As a child living in Te Tai Tokerau, Teresa vividly remembers drinking water from the river.

“I’d lean on a rock and it was magic… But now we’re seeing the consequences of what we’ve done to our land, and it’s not very pretty.”

Going through the vintage publications has pressed upon her the repetition of a certain argument in several of the accompanying articles, challenging the government of the day as to whether we should be chopping down indigenous trees.

“Whether they’re written in the 80s or 90s or 2000s, it’s the same conversation over and over again. At what point do we wake up?”

Teresa HR Lane, Here For Ages, is on now at the Sanderson Contemporary Gallery until Oct 23. Attend the artist talk on October 15 at 11am.