This work was included in sonic.land - a Blindside group show moved online due to covid-19 lockdowns.
https://sonic.land/EDWINA-STEVENS-TI-KOUKA
Tī Kōuka in a Turnip field
7-10-2019 (just before Edievale on the way to Rae’s Junction, Clutha, Te Wāhi Pounamu/Lower South Island).
I am home, in Te Wahi Pounamu, Aotearoa (New Zealand), travelling between Tapanui and Tuapeka West. It is the late morning. I am driving. I turn my head to the right and see them jutting out from the ridgeline of the hill, their distinctness and separation causing me to pull over. I get out of the car and gather my camera and sound recorder, wait for a car to pass and cross the road to the fence-line. I step over the ditch closer to the fence, pass over my bags and slip between the barbed wire and the upper fence lines unsnagged, something practiced since childhood.
I turn to the Tī Kōuka trees, considering their distance from each other. I pause and listen. I hear small birds, a car passes again behind me on the road, I hear and feel the wind, I hear my own breathing. I slowly work my way up the steep paddock of hardened mud, keeping my feet on the dried ridges to keep traction on the unstructured soil, whipped into a smoothness by hundreds of hooves and turned by a plow that had passed through sometime recently, now dried by sun and wind. There are no other trees around. No trees at all, no bushes, no plants, just fragments of turnips which were now gone with the cows who had been here to eat them as winter feed. I stand in this place, uninvited, considering why I walked up here, my eyes and nose begin to run from the cold, strong wind.
When I get to the trees near the fence-line (after carefully negotiating a pair of plovers and their hidden nest in the mud), I find some concentrated mix of effluent and oil reflecting the clouds moving quickly on the wind above. Also, a PVC pipe and fallen fence posts and barbed wire lay in the mud, joined by a length of one of the trees that had broken off and fallen away from the rest of the living tree above ground. Lying amongst its repurposed likenesses. Detritus of the farming practices brought from one place, transposed on and intermingled with another. I grew up near here, I come from a farming family from this area, I have passed through here more times than I can count.
Tī Kōuka are often used by farmers as boundary markers due to their ability to thrive in wind and sun exposure. The trees grow their stems above and below ground level simultaneously, with their roots stretching outwards and down. Tī Kōuka are fire resistant, and thrive in difficult conditions such as full sun and high winds. I consider how these trees had ‘value’ to the agrarian agenda, therefore they were allowed to stay? Or perhaps these ones just kept growing back as they are well known for growing back from their underground stem even though they can be cut to ground level.
In a place like this, it’s hard to avoid imagining what the ngahere (forest) would have been like before colonisation. I wonder if these trees are connected to that time of clearing, how many others surrounded them, a complex network of plants and manu (birds) that would have reached all the way to the south-east coast. I wondered how long these particular trees had been there; how many times they might have regrown in this spot.
The extreme green pasture on one side, the ‘ideal’. The land dug away along the boundary of the fence, an expanse of mud, waiting for a new round of ‘usage’. Here now is whenua (land), re-shaped, to a different agenda.
There is a water pump between them and a tank nearby on the other side of the fence. The pump has a concrete chamber from which comes a loose bell-like ringing sound of moving cold water echoing in concrete. A chip in the corner of its heavy concrete lid allowed me to record the sound of inside and outside simultaneously, thinking of the waters part in this accumulation, this happening, only surfacing here for a minute.
The wind is serious. I shelter in the small hollow one of the trees made while I sit and listen and look, thinking about their being up here like this.
I sit the tripod on the pump and record the trees as they stand here in the wind, the light changing rapidly as the clouds crossed quickly overhead. The ground below, the adjacent green field of grass on the other side of the boundary, the cracked turnip field. I look out to the North-east and can see Te Tappuae-o-Uenuku.
I think about their root structure that I can’t see, reaching down and across under the ground.
I think about time presented here, its various forms and interactions depending on ...
I think about the elements as the seasons change and the purposes of the fields around them changing for whatever purpose. I watch their rattling leaves in the strong wind. Their bark and where the mud recedes away exposing the base of the tree like an exposed tooth in a gum.
The rattling, resonant water in the pump chamber. The wind, the tiny grass birds I can hear everywhere but can’t see. The plovers that are still nervously milling about together indecisively on their little legs, scuttering about on the dried mud. Their bright red beaks the only way of really spotting them against the repeating texture of where the hooves have been.
Following these initial moments (the driving by and looking up, noticing the trees) where my trajectory is shifted, to take the opportunity to continue to take notice. To look and to listen within the moment as much as possible, to think within that space and study those thoughts while continuing to listen and look. These moments are around us all the time, these interactions between realities.
———
After recording most of the files were completely unusable due to wind noise. The process is very improvised, only carrying a small kit with me. I don’t make return journeys to re-record anything, as the moment passes.
In response to this place, and the thoughts and feeling of being there as I was, I generated an underlying sound bed of wind and textures, the imagined harmonics of the earth underneath, the material of the trees put in motion by the high winds with a modular synthesiser system.
The final soundtrack is comprised of these generated sounds and some salvageable field recordings accompanying the clips of different view points.
