Transcript of the 2020 Artist in Residence - Chris McDowall

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[Instrumental music and sounds of bird song play throughout the video. Auckland Council pōhutukawa logo sits in the top right of the screen.]

[Video: Footage of Aotea / Great Barrier Island from the air, the plane landing and Chris driving into the sanctuary.]

Chris: I arrived on the island and there was actually only really one person that I knew here. And aside from that I knew that I wanted to talk to lots of people and incorporate their knowledge and their experiences into what I was doing, and what I was creating. But I didn’t really know how that was going to happen.

[Video: Footage of Chris driving through trees, past a map of the sanctuary and tree canopy.]

Chris: And it’s been incredible. I’ve just met so many people and there have been so many people who have been so generous with their time.

[Screen title: Mapping Glenfern. Text on screen reads: 2020 Artist Residency, Glenfern Sanctuary, Aotea / Great Barrier.]

[Video: Footage of Chris opening wooden sliding doors to show the bushwalking along a path and a kaka perched on a sign.]

Chris: My name is Chris McDowall and I'm a geographer and cartographer. And I guess I come here bringing a geographic eye and trying to communicate the things that I see in a visual way for other people.

[Video: Footage of tree canopy and Chris looking at his phone with his notebook balanced on a fence rail.]

Chris: A cartographer is really a person who creates maps. One of the ways that I have talked about things that I want to do at Glenfern is in terms of narrative mapping.

[Video: Footage of Chris looking at a map and then closely at two trees using the torch on his phone.]

[Text on screen reads: Chris McDowall – 2020 Artist in Residence.]

[Video: Footage of Chris talking.]

Chris: Narrative mapping I think is a type of mapping where you’re actually actively trying to collect stories and then somehow represent those stories in the map itself. Last year myself and Tim Denee, a Wellington-based graphic designer, published an atlas of Aotearoa called ‘We Are Here’. In that atlas we tried to find as many different views of different aspects of these islands.

[Text on screen reads: Bridget Pancoust and Brad Moss – Glenfern Regional Parkland Managers.]

[Video: Footage of Chris walking through trees and up steps. This is followed by Bridget looking at the book titled ‘We Are Here’ with Brad sitting in the background.]

Chris: And so we were looking at Aotearoa New Zealand through its physical form, and through the things that live here, and through people and settlements, and through history and through economy.

[Video: Footage of Chris sitting next to a tree trunk and six ducklings playing in mud.]

Chris: What I’m trying to do here is almost like something like that in miniature. It’s different, but something like that in miniature where it’s coming to a place and trying to look at it from different angles.

[Video: Footage of a photo montage, Chris sitting talking and a panned view across the bay to the sanctuary.]

Chris: What if we look at it in terms of its ecology. What if we look at it in terms of its history. What if we look at it in terms of its physical form. What if we look at it in terms of its geology. What if we look at it in terms of its hydrology. What if we look at it in terms of its stars and its kind of astronomical context. What if we look at it in terms of the people who were here before and all the different ways that this land has been used. And so it’s trying to map this place from these many different vantages and these many different angles.

[Video: Footage of the bay and bush from the top of a hill and Chris working inside on a computer.]

Chris: What I really am trying to do is just to create these small spaces for contemplation in the form of maps. I work a lot with data and ultimately data is, they are observations and records and measurements. One of the things you can do with data is you can work with it in a statistical fashion.

[Video: Footage of Chris working at the computer with closeups of his work.]

Chris: But there is something else you can do with data and that’s you can visualise it. So you can take these numbers and categories, and sequences and links between things, and you can try and come up with visual ways of expressing them.

Chris: So you can use colour or size or shape or orientation or these other visual variables, and kind of map rows in a spreadsheet or entries in a database to a physical page, or to a screen on a computer. And I guess that’s what data visualisation is. It’s a visual expression of a set of measurements or observations.

[Video: Footage of the hills, bush and a kereru flying away from a tree. This is followed by Chris talking and a series of photos of school children looking at maps.]

Chris: Over the hill from Fitzroy is Okiwi, and it’s got one of the three primary schools on the island. The school regularly comes out to Glenfern for different reasons. And so they did, a group of four older students came out and they were awesome. We spent the first part of the morning looking at maps and talking about maps. I asked them if they wanted to make a map together, like a map with me.

[Video: Footage of Chris and the children in the bush, and Chris scrolling through a map on a computer screen.]

Chris: I thought it might be a neat idea to take the students and go for a walk and ask them to not just name, but to identify things along the path that they thought should have a name, and then to decide on a name for them. At the moment I’m turning those names into a map.

[Video: Footage of puddles and pools in the bush, and Chris looking up through the kahikatea and pointing out seedlings and small fern.]

Chris: These, yeah the girls called these the mermaid pools. And they’re beneath these two kahikatea which are the only ones in the park I think. There’s like really, really old, tall, beautiful trees. And then all through here there’s kahikatea seedlings…if you look down into the bush and they look like tiny little ferns.

[Video: Footage of Chris looking at a seedling closely and then up into a kohekohe tree.]

[Text on screen reads: Audio of pūriri grub in this tree, recorded by Chris one night.]

Chris: Here’s one here, this beautiful little seedling. It’s so crazy that this could grow into just a massive, massive tree. And I think this is kohekohe this tree. I can hear, I often hear grubs in here. I talked to John Ogden, one of the ecologists about this and he’s pretty sure that it’s pūriri moth in this tree. And you can see emergence holes, in the past where insects have come out.

Chris: But yeah, up here at night you can often hear them, scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch, quite loud, just in this section. I think that there’s something that’s going to hatch out…in here there’s been something. So yeah, so I’ve spent quite a bit of time up here in the middle of the night, because things are out at night. Like the forest is so different at night.

[Video: Footage of the night sky with trees blowing in the breeze and Chris looking up while he is talking.]

Chris: Aotea has been designated a Dark Sky Sanctuary. It’s light that has taken years, or hundreds of years, or thousands of years, or tens of thousands of years or even millions of years to reach the eye. And so I guess that’s what I think about when I’m under this dark sky is just like "oh my god, this light is so old, this light has travelled so far".

[Video: Footage of Chris working at a computer and a table covered with books and maps.]

Chris: And so what I’m making here is a map of the stars on a particular moment when I was here at Glenfern. I’ve never actually made a star map before. I’ve always wanted to, so it’s been a really cool opportunity.

Chris: In order to do this, I took this data which kind of looks like this. It’s like 120,000-odd rows, and each row is a different star starting with the sun. I took this big data set and I wrote some code that explored it, tentatively. I was kind of interested in creating something that I could make a map of the sky where it’s coloured by how long the light has travelled in order to reach a person’s eyes.

Chris: So, the very closest stars, the light has only travelled, “only", a year or two or three or four years. Whereas some of the more distant stars the light’s been travelling for hundreds and hundreds of years. And so, I wrote this script that kind of like ‘prepared’ the data to do that. Specifically to work with, I needed to get the distance in a nice clean kind of form that I could work with.

[Video: Footage of the view out the cottage window and Chris standing by a map on the wall.]

Chris: This is a map of the Kotuku Peninsula which includes the Glenfern Sanctuary. And this map has kind of been my world, or what’s represented on this map has been my world for nearly eight weeks.

[Video: Footage of the fenced predator free area with marked trees and Chris working in the cottage.]

Chris: Glenfern Sanctuary - it has its predator fence. And then inside of that fence there is a very dense network of traps, roughly every 50 metres or so, in pretty much any direction there is a rat trap.

Chris: I’ve done a few maps where I try to represent the trapping network which is so important to this place in terms of the day to day life of the place. But also, as soon as you leave the trail there are just these traps everywhere, and that’s the reality of a sanctuary like this. And each one of those traps has been located with GPS and is stored somewhere.

[Video: Footage of Chris and sanctuary staff checking markers and signposts in the bush, and looking at maps and photos on the computer.]

Chris: So those are signposts really for the park managers, and the trapping, especially for the volunteers, and they signify different lines. For me they’re like the latitude and longitude of this park and I can use those to both find my way literally when I’m in the bush, but also to locate observations.

Chris: The participatory work…I feel like that has gone as I hoped it would, which is just to have lots of conversations with lots of people, and to spend lots of time walking and talking with people in the bush. And also to gather around large maps and talk about places. And then to, in some cases, create a dedicated map with that person’s knowledge. And so, there aren’t these very localised maps like I thought there would be. Instead there are just all these different faces of Kotuku Peninsula.

[Video: Footage of Chris standing at the jetty watching dolphins playing in the sea.]

[Text on screen reads: Project Co-ordinator – Michell Edge. Director, Camera, Editor – Kirsty MacDonald. 2021]

Chris: A special place and a special experience. And yeah, I just love this island, I think it’s amazing. I love the people. I wonder…I should calculate what percentage of the population have helped me, cause it’s quite large. Yeah, this place is just a real treasure.

[Video: Footage of the view around the sanctuary.]

[Text on screen reads: Want to go to Glenfern Sanctuary? You can visit or stayover in the lodge or cottage. www.glenfern.org.nz]

[Video: Footage of the Auckland Council pōhutukawa logo aucklandcouncil.govt.nz.]

[Duration of video: 11 min 43 secs]

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