Neil Pardington | Pūtahi / Confluence: {Suite} Wellington

Te whenua carries her stories in her belly—that great store-house of emotional memory—making a mockery of the settler state’s modus operandi, the art of forgetting. In Pūtahi/Confluence, Neil Pardington turns his gaze towards the sites of buried histories, both colonial and environmental. These images force pause on otherwise overlooked sites of decay and disrepair, on infrastructure that lays itself across the land like a beached container ship. The built and natural environments continue to meet and touch, but they never quite merge. In witnessing the juxtaposition between the two surfaces—the made and the found—we are reminded of the great chasm between exploitation and manaakitanga, between mastery and vulnerability, between appropriation and attunement. Pūtahi/Confluence is a metaphor for the meeting of two peoples in one land, and a reminder of the manifest ways in which our histories refuse to disappear.

—Lynley Edmeades, Landfall 244