CUTTING
2010
ARTIST STATEMENT
The road into and out of Queenstown is a place where your eyes widen, your heart rate increases and your posture stiffens. It is a dangerous, wildly twisted ribbon of road. You feel that if you’re not on high alert, applying full concentration, you might just fly over the edge into the abyss or plough straight into a cliff. Driving the road requires a degree of physically as you swing the wheel through multiple hairpin bends gouged into the landscape. When the road first opened it was deemed so dangerous that only those who had received training and a special license were allowed to drive it.
Coupled with the danger of this stretch of the highway is the drama of the landscape. Stopping the car on tiny spaces on the side of the road is dangerous but it transformed my experience of the place.
When driving, the vistas are bare and desolate. But on foot the hills surprise, with an array of grasses, lush gullies of ferns, streams and birds and rabbits. Up close, the rich palette of rock faces are stained with tannins and oxides and speckled with brightly coloured lichens. These stoic cuttings are pressed hard alongside the tarmac’s stream of vehicles in what is a strange and beautiful marriage.