Geoff Dixon

To the moon and stars and back

23 May – 12 June 2022

As always my work is about effect, pasts and futures, real or imagined. Our environment has a memory, the world is a sum of its own experiences. We carry each layer of the world’s history with us in parallel as we conjure up the future. On a trip to Tiri Tiri Mātangi some years ago I was aware of the layers of history that shaped the island… its geographical history combined with layers of Māori, pastoral, scientific and environmental histories at different times. For me ‘Tiri’ had a sense of the environment as a sum of its experiences in parallel.

Bird painters of old often depicted a disparate group of their subjects in an imagined landscape. Birds that ordinarily would not have flocked together. While not being a particular fan of Rousseau, I love the concept of the imagined landscape of a New World that art viewers of the day must have wondered about… much as we might wonder about outer space and alien worlds. Our nature is one of constant movement and migration, an amalgam.

I’m fascinated with the notion that through the millennia, and our migrational nature,  where we begin isn’t where we end up. Our future is fluid and the aggregate nature of our cultures and environments expanding. I continued that theme into this recent assemblage. 

– Geoff Dixon, 2022