Still image

Kate Walker and Cliff Fell, still from The M at the End of the Earth. Courtesy of the artists.

 

Kate Walker & Cliff Fell

12 January - 8 February 2009 in the Square² Gallery

Based on a poem by Cliff Fell

The M at the End of the Earth
DVD
duration: 2 minutes, 6 seconds, looped
Courtesy of the artists

The M at the End of the Earth is an inter-textual video work, moving between the genres of poetry and video art. The reading of Cliff Fell’s poem The M at the End of the Earth accompanies footage of the American southwest. The text references Dante, a significant figure in the work of both artists, and his seemingly prophetic allusion to future apocalyptic global events. The austere mid-west landscape operates as a place where big and sobering thoughts about the state of the earth gain relevance, while the narrator’s voice is rendered humble and small against the ancient landscape.

Kate Walker lived in Tucson, Arizona in 2004, while completing her Masters in Fine Arts at the University of Arizona. She shot the footage for this film during her time in America, where much of her work dealt with the specifics of place, with folk histories and local narrative. Her engagement with American culture and an exploration of local colonial histories took her traveling around southwest cities, mines and Native American reservations, and this work exists as a personal document of that time also. She says: ’Excavating the buried and making visible the invisible are important to my working practice. My visual language is made up of the overlooked and profane – the objects and sign systems which fill our visual field but which receive little attention.’

Cliff Fell also travelled in mid-west America in 2004, on a Creative New Zealand travel fellowship awarded for his book of poetry, Beauty of the Badlands (VUP). The book pivots on a speculative relationship between the Nelson region, birthplace of Ernest Rutherford (pioneer of nuclear physics) and the US southwest as birthplace and primary testing zone for the nuclear bomb. Both artists live in Nelson, and lecture art at the School of Arts at Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology.

Artists Statement
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