Kindred Specters: Myth, Kinship and Embodiment within the Colonised Landscape

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Kindred Specters is a practice-based Fine Art research project focused on representations of kinship. The project engages with key social and environmental problems, exploring relatedness as an ecological concept that is key to establishing modes of living together that are more sustainable. Grounded in a study of early colonial history in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ), the project investigates myth, fiction and memory as a means to envisage new kinship relationships in the context of colonial history, globalisation and climate change. The NZ landscape, profoundly altered by colonisation, is a highly threatened ecosystem, currently provoking pioneering ecological research. This study will draw on and extend that work, setting it in dialogue with developments in visual art, decolonial and feminist theory. The project will center around an imagined dialogue with my great-great grandmother, who was one of the early colonists of New Zealand. Tracing passages of subjective and ontological fluidity between generations, communities, species, and interpretations, Kindred Specters performs a kind of haunting, unearthing a personal history in order to call up embodied histories of violence, marginalisation, and tenacious survival. Research Background and Approach This project will allow me to build on an exploration of the relationship between ritual, myth, ecological fragility, and the politics of the body, which has emerged within my artistic practice in the last four years. This has led development of a series of narrative figures drawn from British and Maori mythology that have become the basis for the development of sculptures, performances and video works. These works use material, formal and narrative constructs to explore subtle links between the gendered body, local mythology and environmental degradation. Drawing on feminist theories of embodiment and corporeal experience, Kindred Specters extends this enquiry by exploring the ways in which ideas of relatedness within our own communities inform our relationship with the environment. Maori folklore contains conceptions of kinship and describes patterns of interaction between human communities and the landscape that will be key to my investigation. In responding to this material I will work with a group of Maori artists and academics. Considering the politically sensitive issues surrounding the appropriation and co-option of myths from non-Western cultures, we will explore the possibilities for settler and indigenous artists and researchers to generate new forms of kinship as a ground for working together. In dialogue with this process, I will examine contemporary texts and artworks that depict forms of relatedness situated within historical, futuristic or imagined contexts that cut against dominant approaches to landscape, environment and kinship found in patriarchal Western societies, seeking to reimagine the limits of the familial and expanding them to include a network of human and non-human actors. My research will draw especially on both Marilyn Strathern's ethnographic research into Melanesian kinship structures and gendered relations, and Donna Haraway's recent theorising of interspecies companionship. By foregrounding decolonial perspectives and rooting the research in a practice-based, embodied and collaborative process, Kindred Specters seeks to extend and complicate the theoretical material I draw on. Relating anthropological theories of an expanded notion of kinship that spans cultures, species and corporeal-technological boundaries to notions of flow between bodies, organic and inanimate matter, the project uses material and sculptural research, alongside text and video, to explore the specifically physical experience of relatedness. Establishing dynamic interplays between practice and research, this enquiry will lead to the development of a series of new images that reframe our relatedness with each other, with those we marginalise.