“It’s very affirming to know that others have responded positively to the sculpture, with curiosity and interest.
“Winning a prize draws more attention to the work; we hope that people will view it and have thought-provoking conversations about land use, history and the small creatures that share New Zealand with us.
“We are immensely grateful to the team at the Auckland Botanic Gardens for helping us and to the judges for choosing our work,” they said.
This is what the plaque says which is displayed next to the work:
Cenotaph for a Snail
- in remembrance of the slow, the quiet, the small, the indigenous and the endangered.
New Zealand has a rich and diverse indigenous land snail fauna which is threatened by habitat loss and increased predation. Hermaphroditic and mostly nocturnal, the larger snails, Powelliphanta and Paryphanta, can live for more than 20 years.
Although they prefer the darkness of leaf litter on the forest floor, our monument raises the snail up in order to draw attention to its existence and admire its beautiful form.
The plinth beneath it is covered with a photograph of a typical rural New Zealand landscape that has been deforested and grazed.
Presumably, this landscape was once the idyllic, deeply forested home of many gastropods. Our monument draws attention to this small quiet creature and its loss of habitat, as well as future aspirations for rewilding our historic carbon sink of native forest.
Local Whanganui artists Emma Camden and Greg Tuthill (living in Palmerston North but building a house here) are also in the exhibition https://www.sculptureinthegardens.nz/2024-25-exhibition.
Andrea Gardner has an exhibition currently at Napier’s Rabbit Room https://therabbitroomgallery.com/.
Bunkley has a video scheduled to be exhibited at the CICA museum in South Korea next year (in a satellite city in the Seoul region), and several videos to be part of an exhibition, The 4 Ecologists.
This will be featuring videos by Brit Bunkley (New Zealand), Silvia de Gennaro (Italy), Maria Korporal (Netherlands) and Susanne Wiegner (Germany).
His videos also feature at the Torrance Art Museum from January 18 to March 1 next year in the Los Angeles region; and as one part of the Anthropocene Foundry Addis Ababa 2024 programme from December 28, 2024, to January 1, 2025, at Addis Video Art Festival (Ethiopia) and at the Anthropocene Foundry Kolkata at Tent Biennale for Experimental Film Kolkata, India, from December 19 to 21 this year. https://foundation.nmartproject.net/foundation-screening-series/?fbclid=IwY2xjawGsx59leHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHTshRHJL4LqBHzX3yBY3Lponv4bOylK1KVt1ULduNmT39r2psSwt7YTPaA_aem_8zJsmoxRi7aZI7fFKJT2tw
