Project 51 - Off The Ground - The Commons

Kate Fitzharris
April 3rd – May 30th 2021
The Dunedin Botanic Gardens - entrance at Lovelock avenue or Cnr Opoho Road and Great King St, North Dunedin
Images: Justin Spiers

Kate Fitzharris worked with the Dunedin Botanic Garden, in particular curator of the Rhododendron Dell Doug Thomson to realise her project titled the Commons. The caretakers of the Dunedin Botanic Garden worked together to find sites, collect the raw clay, pine needles, sticks and the likes so Kate could start the process of making the “Botanic Garden raw clay’. The resulting clay mix was used to to hand build the form onsite over the period of a week.

The first weekend of the making process Kate invited the public along to share in the site specific construction. Hand building is slow and the ongoing conversations fed into the clay, coil by coil, as the Commons came to be.

The Commons explored the blurred lines between what we often think of as distinct spaces or perspectives: private/public, individual/collective, domestic/wild, human/nature, object/viewer. It reminds us that wild public places can be as intimate and homely as our domestic spaces, and that we have wild roots to our domestic lives. The Commons refers to places and resources not owned privately, but held in common and managed for the collective good. It also alludes to seeking out what we hold in common with each other and what we find around us, so we may have a more empathetic, connected world view.

Follow Kates work on instagram as kateoxide

Text by Joanna Osborne. Images by Justin Spiers. Design and print by POINT.