Sediments and Atmospheres 2025.
I pay my respects to the Ngāi Tahu, whose lands in Te Waka-o-Aoraki in Aotearoa/New Zealand I was grateful to visit in May 2024. Observing the tapu status of the mountain in Māori lore, I acknowledge the importance of the ancestral mountain Tititea, together with Aoraki, and stand in support of the Tino rangatiratanga of their descendants, as recognised in Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
This body of work is drawn from a period spent watching the autumn weather and light sweep across the alpine landscape, courtesy of the Kenneth Myer Artist Residency on the South Island of Aotearoa/New Zealand.
In the studio, the material at the heart of fresco making is slaked lime, itself born of a limestone landscape at one with water, with its origins in the ancient seabed. Mixed with an aggregate such as sand or marble dust, it becomes sedimentary over the 24-hour period of curing, full of tiny stone like fissures that echo the bedrock of the mountain. Brushed onto a fresco surface, slaked lime becomes an atmospheric echo of the weather world; mixed with vermillion pigment it’s the shy dawn light or tinted with azurite and carbon it might resemble a descending snowstorm.
The fresco plaster is laid over washed muslin which enables removal from the wall after curing – together these form a fresco skin. The addition of encaustic wax renders the slaked lime transparent whilst also protecting the delicate patterns that give each skin it’s character. Pigments added to the fresco skins reflect the intense reds and greens of the vegetation found in the icy tarns, and produce their own sedimentary patterning, such as long curved lines for raw umber or radiating lines for chromium oxide. Skins cut into the shape of wayfinding arrows mark movements in a pathless landscape. These were the first things I made whilst on residency after the departure of our mountain guide and laying them out became a way to grow familiarity with the topography through a slow material connection to the ground.
The paintings arise at the intersection of the unpredictable materiality of fresco making, and a commitment to close observation of the structure of the mountain range as captured in sequences of photographs and video shot at different times of day. No part of the form is invented, rather I am interested in finding strangeness within the rhythmic rise and fall of the earth’s formation over deep time. The length of the residency and the position of Whare Kea Chalet provided an unprecedented opportunity to observe the Southern Alps transforming through the shapeshifting of water at altitude, in other words, the sacred snowfall.
Acknowledgements
Big thanks to Martyn and Louise Myer for creating and then so generously sharing the unique sites of Whare Kea Lodge and Chalet with recipients of the Kenneth Myer Residency. Thanks also to the staff at Aspiring Helicopter for bringing us safely up and down through the Matukituki Valley, Monika Bischof from Wanaka Mountain Guides for teaching us how to navigate the terrain and Gillian Boyes for arranging everything.
My thanks also to Monika Ciolek for her company and insightful research and advice, Maurizio Toscano for guiding the work as always, Steven Rendall for professional support and Stuart Purves and the staff at Australian Galleries.
Installation shots are by Emma Byrnes and single works have been photographed by Les Walkling.
Sarah Tomasetti 2025