Like the Turf

Forrester Gallery, Ōamaru, Aotearoa New Zealand
2 Nov 2024 - 26 Jan 2025

Left Bank Gallery, Greymouth, Aotearoa New Zealand
7 Feb - 3 Mar 2025

‘Cornishmen are like the turf,
Cornishmen roam all the earth’[1]

Like the Turf reveals Caroline McQuarrie’s artistic exploration of Pākehā histories of colonial settlement through the examination of a specific set of immigrants in late 19th century Aotearoa New Zealand. Skilled migrants and their families left Cornwall and Southwest Devon’s failing tin mines to join the New Zealand gold rushes or work in underground gold and coal mines. Locations in Aotearoa the miners landed stretched from Kawau Island in the Hauraki Gulf through the Coromandel, the West Coast and into Otago. Conceptually this exhibition examines intergenerational histories and sociologies. Catherine Delahunty has described the post-migratory experience as “the severing from ancestors and from the land that has brought us material advantage and spiritual emptiness. The denial of this condition assists us in our denial of the tangata whenua indigenous reality and justifies our control of resources. But it has required a weird forgetfulness.”[2] Combining photographic imagery, embroidery and textiles to contextualise the lives of these colonial-settlers, Like the Turf weaves the less visible experience of women and families with the legacy of industry left in the landscape. The imagery in Like the Turf has been made on the whenua of Ngāti Waewae, Kāti Māhaki ki Makaawhio and Kāti Huirapa ki Puketeraki (Ngāi Tahu), Ngāti Hauā (Waikato Tainui) and Ngāti Manuhiri.

This exhibition has been made possible due to support from Toi Rauwhārangi College of Creative Arts, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa Massey University, and Land/Water and the Visual Arts research group at the University of Plymouth.  

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[1] Newton G. Thomas, The Long Winter Ends (1941). Wayne State University Press

[2] Catherine Delahunty, Flush and forget- Pākehā and Te Tiriti. State of the Pākehā Nation: Collected Waitangi Day Speeches and Essays 2006-2015 (2007). Network Waitangi Whangarei

Read the publication published by Forrester Gallery including essay by Annabel Cooper here.