FIXED for good
Dieneke Jansen & Jenny Gillam
June - July 2015
A Tidelines project, Wynyard Quarter, Auckland.
A photographic series of frozen plants native to the Waitemata coastline and listed in Auckland Council's various planting guides. The images of saplings encased in ice were displayed in a lane that runs behind Sanford Seafood's ice-making facility in Wynyard Quarter.
By selecting from the Council's planting catalogues the work references urban planting and landscape designs such as Wynyard Quarter, where native and local plants have been used with a restorative ambition. The plants in the area were integrated into the new environment to act as a filtration system for storm water, however, they needed to be contained in concrete trenches to shield their root systems from ground contaminated from a history of heavy industry in the area.
The work, by alluding to scientific preservation efforts such as plant cryonics and seed banks, captures our present ecological moment, poised between remembering the past and all that has been lost and facing the future and our ongoing struggle against further environmental damage. However despite this aura of preservation, the process of freezing has the opposite effect on the plants. They are unable to draw upon the water frozen around them and the extreme cold is eventually fatal.
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