Text commissioned for Homeshow, 90 Canon
Curated by Louise Palmer/ 23 – 26 November 2017

It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

Edith “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale (Grey Gardens)

It is a strange situation. The space we love is unwilling to remain permanently enclosed. It deploys and appears to move elsewhere without difficulty; into other times, and on different plans of dream and memory. 

Gaston Bachelard, ‘The Poetics of Space’

Presently the house at 90 Canon is open. Having invited a number of artists to contribute work for this exhibition, the space will swell with bodies each wearing the day’s afflictions. They’ll moult, perhaps, leaving some kind of ghost; not unlike the cicada nymphs that will shed their shells in the coming weeks, the very nymphs that were feeding on root juices underfoot when (before the old house was demolished) I called out “Ruby” after the missing cat and picked some enormous lemons, the bog of the back path sucking on my shoes; the nymphs that were underground before then even when in January of 2015 the first exhibition was held at 90 Canon Street. Before it was pulled down Louise cut holes where furniture had been in the old house – Mrs Ward’s house.

This new house mimics the footprint of Mrs Ward’s, and for the most part its volume. In Vitruvius’ architecture treatises from classical antiquity, he describes the tendency of post-nomadic man to construct shelters: …as they kept coming together in greater numbers into one place, finding themselves naturally gifted beyond the other animals in not being obliged to walk with faces to the ground, but upright, and gazing upon the splendour of the starry firmament… they began in the first assembly to construct shelters.

Gazing upon the wonder of the starry firmament, as if the torment of watching the night sky precipitated the construction of roofs. Bachelard furnishes the house with virtues of the universe; constructions that mediate the body’s cosmic proportions. As the starry firmament’s perpetual infinitude defines the skin’s negative space, so the house’s interior supplicates a physical analogy. 

This interior space is encased in ply and concrete. It contains domestic objects, cabinetry and, currently, the artworks that this text skirts. The spectre of Mrs Ward purrs away on her Singer in the north-east corner when, although irritable with sleeplessness, she notes with pleasure through frosty light the plumpness of her second season lemons on their juvenile branches. Meanwhile, having landed on yesterday’s late flight from Sydney, the Wizard is prepared for his first public appearance at a student art festival.

Built structure or no, this space is space. Before there was Mrs Ward’s house the lemon trees were numerous and mature, marking the frontier of the garden and dropping rancid fruit into the adjoining paddock. Assuming the rain didn't swamp the beds and no one untethered the goat, under Louise’s bedroom grew stealthy chard with excess for market; new spuds under the lounge bookshelf. The carport door opened into the outhouse where, with a hand cupped around a candle, shards of crockery discarded down the loo from a muslin bindle; a cold dish inadvertently set on the range in the Madras Street cottage kitchen that looks out over the garden. The heavy snow of ’03 was hard on the garden; the trees nude and prickly, the paddocks slush. Shortly before, in the infancy of Autumn, St Albans amalgamated with the City and, alongside its neighbouring suburbs became a constituent of Greater Christchurch.

George Dickinson subdivided his farm when his joints stiffened too much to bat cricket or climb the fences during frosts. Forming the farm’s northern barrier (and named after his dear late cousin whose life was privileged until it wasn’t), St Albans creek, though barely that in summer, penetrated the land’s sandy humus horizontally so that the smallest rain might swell into deep bog. The horses pulling trailer loads of sand to raise arteries through the paddocks were the first to walk streets that extended ahead of their steps. 

The view through the new sliders across the Halswell quarry paving and over the concrete block fence extended to the creek, not a block away, and on crisp mornings steam hung over it snaking a sagging cloud across the paddock. Meanwhile, facing the other direction, looking across the city to the hills, one might have seen the aberrant Captain Lorraine’s final balloon ascent from Lancaster Park, the taught bladder wafting out across the South Pacific in search of the miraculous. 

Before the Madras Street cottage and the outhouse, before Dickinson’s subdivision, and despite the late snow of ’95 that was deeper than the sheep’s muddy knees and froze them from the outside in, the farm was plenteous; enough so that the cream of spring were frozen aboard the British King and sailed on back to the motherland for consumption. The Northerlies blitzed across the plains, unsettling the mind but sweeping away the stench of hospital effluent that choked the Avon.

This old Waimakariri delta and long time raupō swamp was drained with trenches and plugged with layers of sand. In late summer Toetoe were hacked and trampled and dehydrated with scattered sand, the marshes sucking on boots. Church Property Trustees prepared to subdivide their rural sections bordering North Belt for city farms. Wesleyan Dickinson’s grazing ewes mulched the decaying rushes under hoof, sickly early lambs died and dissolved into the soil beneath the kitchen’s poured concrete floor, their bones rattling deeper with every flood and seismic upset. 

Far far before the lambs died and before the floods and hunts and wars, standing in Louise’s house, you’re in the ocean; it’s dark and the sediments layer up, ready to feed some future forest that will, once ancient, be burnt to drive the moa towards taiaha. 

The space you’re in continues to be altered simply by continuing to exist. Everything that’s in it... only this space knows for sure. 

1 ‘Grey Gardens,’ directed by Albert and David Maysles, The Criterion Collection Inc., 1976

2 Bachelard, Gaston, ‘The Poetics of Space,’ Boston: Beacon Press, 1964

3 Ed. Howe, Thomas Noble and Rowland, Ingrid D., ‘Vitruvius: Ten Books on Architecture,’ Cambridge University Press, 1999