Transcript of the 2023 Artist in Residence's video – Dion Hitchens

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[Piano music plays. Auckland Council pōhutukawa logo sits in the top left of the screen.]

[Video: Footage from the top of the hill looking out over the regional park land and beach. Text on the screen reads ‘Drawing Breath’.]

[Video: Footage of a tuīī on top of a flax bush with the beach and hills in the background followed by Dion talking about his art.]

Dion: What I've been interested in my art and in - I guess you’d say in my life really. I'm really interested in how people connect to the environment around them, what their relationship is, because that relationship to your environment, it's sort of cultural and philosophical and incredibly personal, right? So it's experiential and personal as well.

[Video: Footage of the beach with the waves rolling in and Dion sitting at a picnic table talking with the beach in the background.]

[Text on the screen reads ‘Dion Hitchens Artist in Residence – Tūhoe, Ngāti Porou. 2023 Artist in Residence, Tāwharanui Regional Park’.]

[Video: Footage of the beach and the rock pools, and then back to Dion talking.]

Dion: So for me, one of the things that I'm attracted to with this way of working and with these forms, it's really that relationship to the environment and to the idea that everything's kind of breathing, you know, everything's breathing in its own way, everything's moving, and there's kind of like little microcosms of life in there.

[Video: Footage of waves breaking around the rocks and rock pools filling with water.]

Dion: And you can see it moving and breathing, but you kind of have to stay quite still to see it. And I'm keen on how we get an audience to possibly think differently about a space or about a part of nature than they’ve thought about before, you know.

[Video: Footage of Dion working in a large workshop surrounded by machinery and tools. Close-up shots show him working with various pieces of metal.]

Dion: I'm a sculptor for sure. I really love, I really love colour. So I like colour as much as I like form. And I'm really keen on understanding sort of complex relationships to a place by sort of groups of people, you know. And so I kind of like that notion that even though I'm framing myself as a sculptor in a contemporary model, it's incredibly ambiguous.

[Video: Footage of Dion working at a large table measuring and marking pieces of steel.]

Dion: I'm quite into kinetic and I'm wanting it to be a kinetic work. At the moment we're hoping to have three forms that are powered by water and one form that's powered by sand. Time will tell.

[Video: Footage of the sand dunes with rope fences, a sign with a map of the park, and Dion walking down steps and along the beach.

Dion: Up at Tāwharanui I've been documenting the rock pools and the different life in the rock pools. And there's a particular rock which is kind of this big flat rock. I don't know if it has a particular name. That’s something I have to ask mana whenua if they have a name for. But it's a rock that I've looked at when I'm surfing a lot and then it's nice to be actually out of the water and around it, documenting it. And it's got all this really lovely life in it.

[Video: Footage of the rock pools with a variety of sea weeds and Dion climbing around the rocks.]

Dion: So I've been enjoying that and I've been creating these forms, knowing that I'm going to make this kinetic, these kinetic shapes. Then I've been creating forms that reference those, the things I'm finding in the rock pools. So I'm kind of bringing these ideas together.

[Video: Footage of a crab crawling out of a broken oyster shell stuck on a rock and Dion filming in and around the rock pools.]

Dion: When I've been going through the rock pools and I've been filming in there, I'm looking for certain things, I think, oh yeah, that's visually really beautiful. And what I'm noticing is that there's certain collections of stills which constantly have the same species in them.

[Video: Footage of Dion photographing the underwater life in the rock pools.]

Dion: And so I'm looking at those shapes of those species as elements that majorly inform the work. It's kind of a way of working out what I'm attracted to, if that makes sense. I like the fact that the pools have their own little ecosystem and you can see it really clearly. Oh, it's got this particular type of plant in it, or it might be a darker pool and I notice that the pools that are more in shadow, actually have more colour in them.

[Video: Footage of bright orange sponges tucked under the edge of the rocks, Dion moving his camera around them and then walking across the rocks.]

Dion: So some of the sponges like to have less light on them, obviously, right? So they're not growing out in the harsh light so you can kind of start to see there's a logic to the space as you're interacting with it and there's a logic to the organisms and the way that they're kind of breeding in their own little ecological pools.

[Video: Footage leading into Tāwharanui Bach and the dining area where Dion shows some of the plasticine models he’s made and photos on the wall.]

Dion: I've done some little, a couple of little models, plasticine models. Well, it's just a way for me to pare back some of the visual material that I'm collecting, right? So the visual materials….it’s just so dense and so much of it... and you know, I kind of want to make everything kind of simpler because I need to make quite a solid form because I want these things to open up.

[Video: Footage of Dion working with the plasticine models at the dining room table.]

Dion: So, they need to be quite solid to start with. Because you imagine these things are meant to open up. Imagine if that opens up, then it can't hit any of the other bits around it, so it becomes problematic. That's why I'm trying to simplify them so that the textures are built into the form itself.

Dion: So, if you see these forms here, they're really just taken off...you can see a couple of different sponges…and they're really just taken out of images from the rock pools. So, I've kind of taken some of that...so those orange ones have turned into this form here. And then I'm using reused materials on top of that.

[Video: Footage of Dion in the workshop surrounded by tools and machinery.]

Dion: We went to the Ports of Auckland and had a chance to look at what they're not using and what's come out of the ocean. Because I was really interested in materials that are sort of man-made and then have come out of the ocean and reusing those because it's kind of part of that story if you like.

[Video: Footage of a large channel marker on the back of a truck, and the marker in pieces on a trailer.]

And so they were really keen on me using a channel marker and I kind of thought, yeah that sounds great. I didn't really understand how big they were. They looked smaller there! And it arrived on a truck. So I've cut that into pieces already and I've got that up at the residency and it's because it's the sanctuary up there, we've got to be really careful.

[Video: Footage of Dion working with pieces of the channel marker inside a small tent in the garage.]

Dion: It's like, you know, ecologically they're really special and there's so much going on and so much research and scientific research and that happening in the environment it’s quite mind blowing. So, I'm really conscious of the little bits of plastic that come out of working it. So, I've got this little garage that I'm working in, and I've put a little six-person tent inside it. And I'm using the fly on the tent and everything because it's all made to keep insects out. I'm using it to keep plastic in.

[Video: Footage of Dion outside the garage showing different pieces of the sculpture made from pieces of the channel marker and putting them on the corten steel base.]

Dion: Right - this is the outside of the form and these are the insides. They fit onto the corten steel structures. So you can see this is the base of where I've started. And then this thing here, I don’t know what number that is…11…that one will fit onto here like so, and so it can move you see. So they'll open and close and do that.

[Video: Footage of Dion standing in the garden talking about the plasticine forms and the pieces of the sculpture being loaded onto a trailer.]

I'm not trying to make replicas of nature. I'm just trying to make forms that are slightly inspired by the environment. But then, by making them sort of move and kind of in a way where they open and close or kind of breathe, in some ways, they make these forms visually more alive.

[Video: Footage of Dion and another person placing the completed sculpture around a flat grassed area.]

Dion: Making art is always a little bit of a journey, right? So you start the journey and you have a direction that you're heading in. It's not even marked on the map where you're going to go. So yeah, I'm really grateful to be here. I'm really grateful to be doing the residency because it's really helped me to kind of define and see exactly where I want to take my art making and actually very much based on the work that I've done here.

Dion: So, I've really been, you know, researching some new underwater cameras and already committed to go and get my diving license and go and do some diving so I can spend longer under the water and get to places that I'm not getting to at the moment. I'm quite excited about where it's leading me to.

[Instrumental music playing. Text on screen reads ‘Music – Jessie Hitchens’.]

[Auckland Council logo with aucklandcouncil.govt.nz.]

[Duration of video: 9 minutes, 11 seconds.]

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