JOYCE CAMPBELL

Ten years ago, while Joyce Campbell was living in the Karekare hills overlooking the Tasman Sea, she began transcribing her dreams and those of her young family into a diary. Those dreams were infused with a wild physicality absorbed from their surroundings. Returning to Karekare recently to explore familiar haunts, Campbell came equipped with LiDAR technology designed for land surveying. Her scans produced point clouds. Each point represents a mathematical co-ordinate without mass or volume from which Campbell has derived a virtual mirror-world. In this non-place the apparent solidity of rock is replaced by a sheer fabric mesh that suggests the quantum indeterminacy of matter. Campbell is freed to wander with eyes attuned to the surrealistic, vertiginous quality of that near forgotten dream-world, positioning her camera beneath the soil, in the sky or within the inverted reality behind a cliff face. She prints her images in photogravure, an intaglio photoetching technique first explored by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and thus arguably the earliest form of photographic reproduction. The finished works are reminiscent of mid-18th century etchings of crumbling Roman edifices by Giovanni Battista Piranesi. They sit outside of time, appearing simultaneously futuristic and ancient, fantastical and objective.