Adrienne Rewi Online

Random Anniversary Thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Adrienne Rewi) — Sun, 21 Feb 2016 03:06:00 +0000

Try to imagine all of the photographs you are about to see here, as images of busy, vibrant neighbourhoods filled with all the usual signs of suburban domestic life - streets lined with houses and cars, kids playing in the streets, people gardening and mowing and their lawns, or chatting over the fence.

Because just five-and-a-half years ago, before the September 2010 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck, that's exactly what they were.

Five months after that first big quake, the people of these suburban streets thought they might be on the way to recovery. But that's when the 6.3-magnitude earthquake struck - on February 22, 2011.

Their lives were never the same again.

Tomorrow, February 22, 2016 is the 5-year anniversary of the February quake and in recognition of that, I once again went walking with my camera the Christchurch residential Red Zones.

That's something I've done consistently since the first quakes - much of it catalogued here on this blog - but this time, with the Red Zones now devoid of close to 8,000 homes, it's a surreal experience.

I found myself standing still on corner after corner trying to remember what the streets had been like before.

There are so many things there at odds with my memory of houses and families - gardens reverting to swamp, flocks of geese, plovers and paradise ducks taking over the blank spaces, the total silence but for a man hard at work mowing now-fenced-off expanses of 'lawns' - or are they paddocks or parks?

And if they are parks, why are they fenced off?

There is the occasional dog walker.

And yesterday, a lone woman, hobbling between orange road cones with a walking stick, decorating each one with flowers for the anniversary. It was hard not to think that her limp may have been connected to her own personal earthquake experience.

And I met a fruit forager or two.

I snared a handful of rosy apples for myself in fact.

It's hard to see fruit trees laden with peaches, plums, pears and apples in various stages of ripeness and not think about the people who would normally be watching their fruit in their own back garden, waiting to pick them fresh.

Fruit foraging has become a bit of a thing in the Christchurch Red Zones actually.

Charlie Gates at The Press has written about it. He sent me a link.

https://t.co/QGyWnHWOhf

In my last blog here, I talked about moving on - beyond the earthquakes.

I think many people in Christchurch felt they were finally at 'saturation point' and that it was time to think about the bigger, brighter future (where that was possible).

I think we all thought the worst of the earthquakes were over.

Then last Sunday happened - February 14.

A 5.9-magnitude quake that frightened many of us much more than we would ever have anticipated.

We've had dozens of after-shocks in the week since.

And it's (almost) like revisiting 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 all over again - those days when every day was peppered with multiple after-shocks.

I sat on my sofa that night, my heart racing and I contemplated the unthinkable - another big earthquake that would undo all the house repairs that I had waited four-and-a-half-years for.

I thought then, that if that happened, I would walk away from Christchurch.

I felt certain I couldn't go through all that again - and I spoke to several people to all said the same thing - that another quake would be IT - the signal that it was time to leave.

But would we?

We've stayed through the mayhem of the major quakes, the enormous damage and loss of life they caused.

We've stayed through the incredible frustrations of trying to get our voices heard by EQC and insurance companies - and we've stayed through the disruption of moving out of our houses so they can be repaired.

Then we've done battle all over again - are still, in many cases - as we try to get faulty repairs attended to.

But despite all that, perhaps our ties to place are more complex than we imagine.

For some, the decision will always be clear cut.

For others, it will be far less straightforward.

And for many more, since the earthquakes, there simply is no choice.

I thought about all that again yesterday, as I walked through these silent, bruised places where tortured roads have disintegrated into potholed tracks, where footpaths stop suddenly as if they've run out of breath, where rogue garden plants - roses, agapathus, red hot pokers, honeysuckles - still flower without an audience.

I imagined I heard voices on the wind.

It was probably just a waft of music from some still-liveable house a few streets away but when you stand in these damaged places, it's not hard to imagine the intangible.

I wouldn't want to be there at night.

I'll go back to work tomorrow and apart form our planned office commemoration of the event with a spell of thoughtful silence, I will probably be so busy, that I will forget these photographs.

(For a time).

As I scroll back through them now, I could almost image them as a series of photographs of deserted back-country roads.

But these are not back-country roads.

This is Christchurch.

These are the photographs of the remnants of the city's eastern suburbs.

These are the remnants of people's lives.

Changing Directions

noreply@blogger.com (Adrienne Rewi) — Sat, 05 Sep 2015 23:54:00 +0000

Sometimes it's important to change direction.

Change, they say, freshens our outlook, it takes us to new places, it opens us to new influences.

Not everyone likes change - Cantabrians have found that out the hard way over the last five years since the first large (7.1 mag) earthquake hit the city on September 4, 2010. That shook all of us out of any complacency we may have slumped into.

That event proved the point that change is not always comfortable. It came with a multitude of drawbacks and discomforts - which, it's important to note, many people are still suffering; but for others the last five years of traumatic events have culminated in positive change..... when you think you're going to lose everything, you often fight back with a strength and a courage you never knew you possessed.

I haven't posted anything on this blog for eighteen months.

Because of change.

My life took a new direction - allied but different.

I still write. I still photograph. I still think.

I still draw, I still create.

I just do it in a different way.

I've spent the last five years photographically documenting the decline of the city landscape post-earthquake (and now its slow resurrection), but I finally reached saturation point - and to be fair, once the Government wiped the landscape clear of buildings, once they'd demolished everything in sight, there wasn't much left to photograph - nothing at least, that inspired me to pick up my camera.

Two days ago - September 4 - marked the fifth anniversary of the first Christchurch earthquake.

There have been thousands of aftershocks and major quakes since - the number varies but popular consensus seems to hover between 14,000 to 15,000.

To mark that occasion, I have randomly chosen fifteen photographs that encapsulate my change of (photographic) direction. In many ways, it's no real change - I've always photographed the details of life, the small, common landscapes of the ordinary, so often overlooked; I've always photographed architecture and people and the things that make us human - it's just that I've stopped focusing solely on the devastation of the earthquakes.

It's very liberating.

It's the right time (for me at least) to move on - beyond the earthquakes.

If you live in Christchurch of course, you can never really 'escape' them because there is evidence everywhere of their destruction and their impact on the ordinary lives of ordinary people, but now I want to focus on the positive side of those impacts.

And there are increasing indicators of change.

The new buildings, the construction sites, the new cityscape emerging from the ruins.

I still sometimes play the game of trying to remember what stood on a corner like the one above, before the earthquakes but usually, it's just easier to accept the new.

It's too hard and too confusing to try and reclaim the past.

As always, I celebrate the decorative.

I gather the small beauties that I pass by, snapping them into my camera as if I can somehow make them mine. And in a way, I am of course - that's what photography is all about....recording, expressing, capturing.

I like that the changes forced upon Christchurch have had so many positive outcomes.

There is new street art everywhere. It's as if the 'city fathers', the powers-that-be have relaxed their former up-tight attitudes and allowed the people to express themselves without censure. Personally, I never knew why people opposed street art in the first place. For me, it has always added to the character and colour of a city.

I celebrate the new shapes filling in the post-earthquake void.

Like most people, I don't like every new building and to be fair, an architect has his work cut out trying to please everyone.

But I like that every street is a gallery of emerging work.

In most streets, there's a mix of good and bad (subjectively speaking), but slowly, the gaps are being filled in, the earthquake bruises are being healed, the air is ringing with the sounds of change.

It was never going to be a quick fix and I like that the earthquakes have forced us to change, to adapt.

Like the city itself, our days, our activities, our psyches,our dreams, can take on new shapes.

We can see things in new ways.

Like most writers I suspect, I like the shapes of words and numbers.

For me they have always held a special beauty - not just for the facts and feelings they can convey but for their actual structural shapes, their 'architecture' you might say; and for the memories and connotations they hold, the way they can stimulate thought and memory.

They are a code of sorts, that I like to unpick with my own visual and mental tools.

The house, plain or grand, is where so much of our lives are writ.

The house is where we make our home, our retreat, our sanctuary.

It is our place of comfort, where we can let our guard down.

In Christchurch, the destruction of the house, the unmerciful shaking of that sanctuary, is what (I think) has truly marked so many people. The breaking of our treasures, the loss of tangible memories - the photographs, the favourite cushions, the destroyed keepsakes - that's what has so deeply affected people.

And that's not a comment on the loss of possessions, it is a comment on the loss of the things that intrinsically identify a person, that sets them apart from others; it is about the despair of loss, it is about the despair of feeling like parts of yourself have been erased.

A house is never just a house.

Now I try to celebrate the old and the new simply for what they are, in this moment of time - without putting them through my 'earthquake filter.'

I may say to myself, as I drive by the suburban roller door that announces the new premises of Jonathan Smart Gallery, 'Oh... that's so different to the steep, narrow, mid-city staircase we used to have to climb to Jonathan's gallery,' but I don't see it as a negative; I just accept it as change, as a new direction.

I may smile at the tatty remnants of a broken building butting up against the new; or at the graffiti colouring high-up ruins but I no longer pine for the pre-earthquake city.

I am excited by the prospect of the new.

I may let my mind wander down the old streets, I may remember the times I laughed at the Yellow Cross bar and the people I met there before the earthquakes but isn't that what we do anyway, irrespective of earthquakes changing the face of a city? Don't certain buildings, certain words, certain symbols always trigger our memories of another time?

I don't think anyone who experienced the Christchurch earthquakes will ever forget them.

I don't think they will ever forget that instant of terror when the first quake struck and changed their lives forever.

I don't they will ever forget the way their houses shook and trembled and broke.

They will certainly never forget the uncertainty that followed - the months and in most cases, years of indecision, upheaval and chaos, as they waited to get their houses (their homes), repaired.

That has been the biggest change for most Christchurch residents.

The waiting. The frustration. The despair. The worry. The uncertainty.

Constant.

Unwavering.Unnecessarily prolonged.

Deeply unsettling.

Deeply saddening.

It has been living with that, that has signalled the greatest change.

It has been the digging deep to find the personal courage to deal with the irritation and frustation of it all, that has changed us the most.

It is in how we have all risen to that challenge that defines not only ourselves but how this city will move forward.

Unexpected Partners

noreply@blogger.com (Adrienne Rewi) — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 04:14:00 +0000

Christchurch - 'More Different'

noreply@blogger.com (Adrienne Rewi) — Mon, 29 Dec 2014 01:53:00 +0000

"None of us knows what the next change is going to be, what unexpected opportunity is just around the corner, waiting a few months, or a few years to change all the tenor of our lives."

Kathleen Norris

"Hands Full of Living."

When the Christchurch earthquakes first struck most of us were so caught up in the magnitude of the event - the horror of it - that we probably gave little thought to just how very much it would change our lives. Not just in those first few shattering seconds but over the coming months and years.

I remember laughing when I was first told it could take five years to get my house fixed. That seemed like a lifetime away. It didn't possible, nor fair, that any of us would have to wait that long.

As it turned out, I waited just four years.

I thought that would be the biggest change.

I was wrong. It wasn't.

I thought the change would stop.

I was wrong again. It didn't.

In the course of those four years, change has been a constant in Christchurch.

Just when you think you've learned to live with the ruins, the mayhem, the dirt, the dissatisfaction, life changes again. Christchurch has been like living in a kaleidoscope - one more shake and the very fabric of the place changes again, bringing forth new conditions, new contrasts, new moments of intensity, elation, despair and confusion. Nothing seems simple anymore.

I don't walk the streets with my camera so much either. I don't have the inclination and I seldom have the time. It's a pity because change seems to be speeding up.

The old has been demolished, and now, a new city is slowly emerging from the scraped-bare land.

I'm afraid of missing something important.

"Slipping and sliding from facts

There is no hiding

This is not where we wanted to be."

(Found graffiti on a broken window)

At least, it's not where we planned to be a few years ago.

But now that we're here, I for one am happy to be living in a restless, fast-moving time in Christchurch's history. So much better than a stationary unchanging life.

Things have happened.

Things are happening.

Things will keep happening.

My only regret is that I can't keep pace.

My mind cannot not take it all in and I despair that one day, everything that seems so important now, will be forgotten. This is what drives me to take photographs.

I don't trust myself to remember the important details without words and pictures.

We have all been through too much to forget lightly.

We should certainly move forward. We should delight in the change, embrace it; but I feel bound to carry along the memories of this gigantic rupture in Christchurch''s social history.

"Since changes are going on anyway, the great thing is to learn enough about them so that we will be able to lay hold of them and turn them in the direction of our desires. Conditions and events are neither to be fled from nor passively acquiesced in: they are to be utilised and directed."

John Dewey.

"Reconstruction in Philosophy."

Sometimes, amid the chaos, change is harder to adjust to than you expect.

It sneaks up on you in unexpected ways - like the way you no longer remember what used to to stand on a now vacant city lot. It seems inconceivable that, within a matter of months of a building being demolished, all memory of what was there before seems to be vanished.

You could argue perhaps, that amid so much demolition - over 1000 buildings within the central city itself - it's understandable that your 'inner filing system' would fail you.

But it is unnerving.

Disconcerting.

Bewildering.

Your small certainties seem tampered with.

Here today, gone tomorrow.

Impermanence prevails.

A wall full of penguins today.

Who knows what tomorrow?

A blank section today.

A new convention centre 'tomorrow.'

Every day, change.

Every day "More Different."

There is excitement in that.

In the colour, the new foundations, the new, gleaming surfaces.

And in the proliferation of birds that have taken to our city walls - some serene and uplifting, alluding to some new, happier place in the future; others with a mean glint in their eye, as if picking through the rubble.

An apt metaphor for human behaviour perhaps.

We will get new birds - and new buildings.

We will survive the change - revel in it even.

Because in our hearts, I think we are all chameleons - all wanting to change, and all harbouring an innate ability to do so.

And we are invariably the better for it.

26 Ways to Say Christchurch City Rebuild

noreply@blogger.com (Adrienne Rewi) — Sun, 14 Sep 2014 02:32:00 +0000

I keep hearing about the amazing progress that's taking place in the Christchurch city rebuild following the earthquakes of 2010-13. As a Christchurch resident, I keep wondering where this magical place is. Perhaps I'm just jaded after too many trips into the residential red zones.

Lately though, I've been watching the Knox Presbyterian Church 'rebuild' on the corner of Victoria Street and Bealey Avenue with some interest. It's been a beacon of ruin for almost four years and now, suddenly, it's taking on a new life as a shiny, coppery facade is 'nailed' into place. Perhaps buoyed by this pretty sight - or perhaps a little heady and over-excited by the onset of spring - I went walking earlier, to spot some of this new inner city building action.

Here are a few photographs snapped in the key pockets of building action. And it's important to note that 'pockets' is the key word here. There is still a LONG way to go before we have a functioning inner city, before we fill all those ugly gaps.

I'm not always excited by the new buildings sprouting in our broken city but I am often excited by some of the architectural details, the small, intimate pieces that make up the whole. I like the 'half-sketched,' skeletal nature of a building taking shape. By the time it is completed, I've often lost interest in it completely. I haven't been singularly impressed by anything yet. Let's hope that changes as the rebuild progresses over the coming years.

In the Suburbs - Four Years On.

noreply@blogger.com (Adrienne Rewi) — Sat, 02 Aug 2014 04:22:00 +0000

There was a wild nor'west wind blowing this morning when I set out for North New Brighton and Bexley to see what's become of these two earthquake-ruined suburbs over the last six months. I've visited these areas - and many others - regularly over the last four years, since the first earthquakes, and it's been both intriguing and deeply saddening to watch their decline.

As shocking as the earthquake damage seemed in the beginning, it wasn't until much later that for me, the real impacts hit home. When roads flooded on a regular basis, when people moved out, when the first homes started to be demolished - that's when it struck home that the Christchurch earthquakes had had impacts that would set this city back decades.

These streets in North New Brighton and Bexley show the grimness of the residential aftermath. Yet to be fully wiped clean of ruined houses, yet to be graded smooth and planted over with fresh grass seed, these red zones have a desolation and a loneliness that is difficult to describe. You can't capture the devastation fully on camera but you can certainly 'feel' it and see it, as you drive through.

My own home is currently being repaired by EQC and because of that I think, I have become a little blase, a little complacent. It's not that I've forgotten these ruined places or the former residents whose lives have been turned upside down; but with long-awaited house repairs comes a singular joy - a sense of disbelief actually, that you're finally on the road to recovery and with each fresh coat of paint, it's easy to be side-tracked from others' grim reality.

Today these suburban places lifted me out of my complacency.

They slapped me in the face with the toughest of emotions - loss, grief, anger, abandonment, loneliness, despair - their vast tracts of mud, broken roads and skeletal trees all the sadder in midwinter.

There are new habitats here now.

The ducks, the bossy plovers and the proud pukeko - they all stride across the gouged-out roads with a new confidence, with a sense of territorial ownership that brings you up short. It's odd and unexpected and charming all at once.

In many places, the roads - if they can still be called that - are barely recognisable. They're deeply rutted, often flooded and a trap in waiting for the under-carriage of cars travelling too fast. Not that you see many of those in these areas now either. There may be an occasional sightseer, or perhaps a former resident returning to their old neighbourhood.

It's hard to know what turmoil of emotions must be confronting them as they drive through these abandoned, creepy streets. With rotting rolls of carpet and abandoned furniture strewn along street edges, and graffiti rampant, there's no longer a sense of residential safety here. It's ghostly almost, eerie.

The ruin is heartbreaking, the sense of loneliness palpable.

The overgrown, fenced of children's playground, the single brown velvet chair at the end of a culdesac with its stuffing torn open - both metaphors for the rupture of suburban comforts.

Now permanently flooded roads - nothing really to do with rainfall; a few remaining boarded up windows, broken fences; sagging, disconnected, broken power lines; shattered glass and stolen supermarket trolleys stranded in mud and puddles, torn net curtains - almost more powerful and visually jarring now, almost four years after the first earthquakes, than they were in the beginning.

I sit here now, in the comfort of my temporary EQC accommodation in the heart of Merivale knowing that my own house further east is on the mend. I should be happy but I feel the deep and indescribable sadness - that sadness that descends so often and so unexpectedly on so many Christchurch people; and I realise at last, that it may never go away.

Four Houses, Four Families, Four Stories

noreply@blogger.com (Adrienne Rewi) — Mon, 12 May 2014 02:40:00 +0000

I have hundreds of photographs of abandoned red zone houses in Christchurch.

I only have forty or so recorded stories from some of the earthquake-battered people who once lived in them - people who then, in the thick of thousands of after-shocks, were only too willing to talk about one of the most shattering and damaging experiences of their lives.

I often wonder now, as I walk or cycle through these sad, sad abandoned residential areas, what has become of all of the people - not only the ones I interviewed but all the others too. The thousands who have made off to other places. I wonder what they have taken with them - what memories, what dreams and aspirations, what physical treasures that were too important to leave behind

With every passing week, more and more of these abandoned red-zoned homes are being demolished.

What were once busy suburban communities filled with spinning clothes lines, screaming kids, yelling parents, loud stereos and idling cars, have been reduced to flat, barren tracts of land scraped bare of their suburban histories. Every gone. The few saved trees and the freshly sown grass no replacement for family life.

It's a good thing that so many people have gathered these family stories.

Because before long, we will need to be reminded of them - reminded of the families who once made up the once-vibrant communities of east Christchurch; reminded of the merciless power of Nature to wreck and reshape the human spirit.

The City Revisited

noreply@blogger.com (Adrienne Rewi) — Sun, 11 May 2014 03:29:00 +0000

I haven't spent much time in inner city Christchurch over the last six months.

I've been trying to ignore our earthquake ravaged city.

I've been trying to ignore the fact that, after three and a half years, my house is still not fixed.

I've been trying to ignore everything to do with the earthquakes - the slow progress, the sad stories, the outrage, the anger, the despair, the very futility of it all.

I've just been trying to get on with my life.

Now my house *is* about to get fixed and I'm elated.

It feels like a new beginning. It feels like I can finally leave the earthquakes behind.

But then I see this wall and it seems like an ugly metaphor for all the people still waiting, all the people whose voices still haven't been heard.

And I pick up my camera again to illustrate that, despite positive stories of new buildings, flourishing street art and quirky temporary projects, inner city Christchurch still has a VERY long way to go before it regains even a glimmer of its former charm.

See for yourself.

The demise of the Christchurch City Council chambers

Tuam Street

The end of an era

When was your last moment of wonder?

When was the last time you felt 'all right'?

Under control, buoyant, excited, inspired?

The Bridge of Remembrance

Undignified

Not how most people remember it

The interior of Starbucks.

The daily newspaper open, unread

A tiny capsule of broken history

Shopfront City Mall

Skinny Jeans

Shattered

The shiny and new

Reflecting the broken and barren

A Havana-esque moment

Oddly endearing

Once a hotel

Now an ugly pool

A languishing corner

Three old beauties in various stages of ruin

The Post-it notes of memory

Fading fast

Ruptured retail
Would you feel 'all right'
If you lived here
With this?

Spring in North Canterbury

noreply@blogger.com (Adrienne Rewi) — Sat, 12 Oct 2013 23:55:00 +0000

Dogwood

In Pink

Dogwood

In White

"Spring is sooner recognised by plants than men."

Chinese proverb

"Of course everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colours, there would be an unbelievable shrieking in the heart of the night."

Rainer Maria Rilke

Welcome to Christchurch

noreply@blogger.com (Adrienne Rewi) — Sat, 05 Oct 2013 03:53:00 +0000

Welcome to Christchurch - the Copthorne Hotel, welcoming guests since ages ago

Advancing like an ancient dinosaur

Ninja - Ready for anything in Christchurch

History in the Making

Barbie - and the night out that went very, very wrong

The Way Things Used to Be

noreply@blogger.com (Adrienne Rewi) — Fri, 04 Oct 2013 04:50:00 +0000

Every so often, in an idle moment, I scan through my digital photo files peering at old photos of Christchurch.

Old being pre-September 2010, before the 7.1 earthquake struck that is.

I'm always amazed by how much I have already forgotten, just three years on.

I took these photographs inside Christchurch Cathedral in the Square.

And as we all know, the Cathedral now sits in ruins - towers broken, steeple gone, roof collapsing, mould growing over the stone exterior, pigeons pooping through the interior.

It's a pale, sad shadow of what it used to be, of what you see here.

I'm not a religious person but I am very fond of church architecture and I often went into this cathedral - and, to my mind, the even more spectacular Catholic Basilica - just to sit and watch and listen and contemplate.

Some of my favourite views are those minus people, or, as in this case, just a hint, a shadow of others.

(I've noticed that most of my photographs are either of people, or places - seldom both in one shot).

The famous rose window.

In storage somewhere now (I think).

And with the choristers practising for the annual Christmas performance.

This year I guess they'll give us a tune in Shigeru Ban's Cardboard Cathedral - a very nice temporary replacement.

Same view, different day, different year and fewer people.

And the exterior view that dons a thousand (at least) tourist books.

I used to take this view so much for granted.

I take very little for granted any more.

Christchurch in Eight Verticals

noreply@blogger.com (Adrienne Rewi) — Wed, 02 Oct 2013 05:04:00 +0000

Spring Green

Memorial Stones

Unauthorised Vehicles

Bart Simpson

Empty Shell

Danger Construction

Bird Roost

Afternoon Light

Under the Umbrella

noreply@blogger.com (Adrienne Rewi) — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 04:57:00 +0000

Something about this image has haunted me since I took it in central Christchurch last week.

I watched this old couple walk up to the wire cordon, their faces bleak and pressed against the wire.

I wondered about the memories they had of their city and how they saw it now, post-earthquakes.

It was a grey day, filled with drizzle and cloud.

The sort of day that always stirs my thoughts.

"Come along my dear, we must get out of this weather," he said to her.

She looked at him with a sad smile and together, they turned away from the fence

And walked toward another.

Umbrella raised.

Art in Unexpected Places

noreply@blogger.com (Adrienne Rewi) — Sun, 29 Sep 2013 03:03:00 +0000

One of my favourite shots of Michael Parakowhai's Bull - looking ready to charge the portaloos.

He makes a good billboard too, outside the still-closed Christchurch Art Gallery.

I walked around inner city Christchurch last weekend and found myself photographing some of the many art works that have sprung up since the 2010 earthquake They are many and diverse, and I've photographed a lot of them many times, at different times of day (and night), in different weather. I like that we can do this now - that we have this sudden intimacy with contemporary artworks away from the more formal confines of an art gallery. It brings them to life in new ways I think.

I haven't names all the works I've shown here - mostly because I've either forgotten who the artist is, or, more likely, it's Sunday and I can't be bothered digging around in my files to find out. But I have gathered these images for visual pleasure - and to remind people everywhere that not everything about earthquake-stricken Christchurch is grey and glum and broken.

This is a fabulous display of photographs and texts related to the Christchurch earthquakes - interviews with those who have lived through the worst of it. It stretches along Worcester Boulevard and if you're in Christchurch, it's definitely worth a long look.

I like that the ability to decorate our battered city isn't restricted to the art elite. There's a ton of street art showing up, illuminating dark corners, and this series of works outside the broken (and closed) Christchurch Arts Centre - by school kids I'd say.

Dick Frizzell's marvellous work, set off beautifully by towering cranes and the skeletal beginnings of a new rebuild.

And a wider view, showing my favourite yellow work on the rear of Christchurch Art Gallery - artist's name forgotten and I'm too lazy to get out of my chair to find the appropriate issue of the gallery mag. part of the gallery's Outer Spaces series anyway.

""Fly me up to where you are" by Tiffany Singh, suspended outside the Christchurch City Council - and nicely reflected in the glazed facade.

Another work - I think - from Christchurch Art Gallery's Outer Spaces series called 'Faces from the Collection." Artist unknown.

"Faux Arcadia" by Michaela Cox, high on an exposed concrete block wall at the intersection of High and Hereford Streets.

Street art, Restart Mall

The painted aerial pedestrian walkway over Colombo Street - or part of.

Another from "Faces in the Collection" - this one by Michael Smither.
I like the way it sits beside advertisements for hayfever and allergy medications on the outside of a Cashel Mall pharmacy.

And perhaps my favourite shot of all - One of Neil Dawson's sculptures, sitting on a cordoned off patch of grass like a strange space ship clone. It used to hang over Cashel Mall before the earthquakes. Now it sits here under the trees, behind the cordoned off Otautahi building, waiting for a new beginning.
We all do a lot of waiting around here.
So it's nice to have interesting things to look at.
We could be waiting a lot longer yet.
For repairs.
For a new city.

A City's Scars

noreply@blogger.com (Adrienne Rewi) — Sun, 11 Aug 2013 02:55:00 +0000

There's a haunted, almost ghostly feeling to parts of east Christchurch now.

Almost three years on from the first 7.1 magnitude earthquake of September 4, 2010, huge swathes of some eastern residential suburbs lie abandoned and desolate. Thousands of red-zoned homes sit in a state of abandoned squalor or, increasingly, they have vanished off the face of the earth, as demolition kicks into high gear.

I've walked these red-zoned suburbs constantly over the last three years, watching the downward progression of once-vibrant neighbourhoods. Yesterday, on a cold, grey, mid-winter day, it was an even more sobering experience than usual. The level of decay and ruin seemed heightened and my imagination found it more difficult to conjure up the memories of how things used to be.

As hideous as the Christchurch earthquakes have been over the last three years, I've always had a willingness to capture the aftermath on film. I've felt a palpable sense of excitement at the strange and compelling sights in our broken city. The city's scars have stimulated my imagination and made me think in depth about memory, identity, loss and fear.

Yesterday, I just thought about loss and I wondered how some people will ever recover.

Our city is scarred.

Our people are scarred.

The residential earth is very definitely scarred - scraped clean, torn asunder, flooded, over-grown, unkempt.

In parts, there is little trace left of human habitation - a lone flowering camellia warming up to the idea of spring; a tenacious clump of snowdrops defying winter.

A lone specimen tree, the only survivor of demolition.

Christchurch has been in the news constantly for the last three years.

The rest of New Zealand has been bombarded with images and tales of destruction.

The inner city has been highlighted - the commercial impacts emphasised.

But out in the ruined, red-zoned eastern suburbs, whole communities have battled with much more than broken architecture and invasive liquefaction. They've had to leave their homes - homes they've often lived in for decades. They've had to farewell their gardens, with whole chapters of their past relegated to memory. Then, as well as battling for compensation and negotiating the rebuilding of their lives, they have had to watch all physical evidence of those years be wiped off the face of the earth.

As much as we all hate the word resilience in Christchurch, it does capture something of the strength and determination needed to come back from all that.

Call me sentimental if you will but there's something heart-wrenching about wandering streets filled with scraped-bare sections, a solo tree trying to survive the rigours of demolition.

We all knew it was coming - that stripping of the residential land; but up until recently it was a house here, a house there - shocking but manageable. You could get your head around those small ruptures in the residential landscape. A few months on, it's a different story. Now there are huge tracts of land sitting vacant. Sometimes as many as eight or nine properties in a row, gone.

To say it is sobering is an under-statement.

I wonder what the previous owners think now when they drive by their empty sections - if, in fact they have the will to even do that. How do you look upon that land and not re-live the horrors of the actual earthquakes, hotly followed up by the horrors of disaster and recovery bureaucracy?

I am sure there are many who never go back.

I am sure there are many who are just pleased to have the whole business settled, regardless of the fact that they've lost so much.

When I see stubborn snowdrops and daffodils pushing through these scraped-bare gardens I am both dismayed and heartened at the same time. I feel an intense melancholy, a nostalgia for the recent past, for sunnier more stable times; but at the same time I feel a rush of pleasure that so many Cantabrians have, like the snowdrops and daffodils, pushed through the (bureaucratic) crap and come out the other side. It's depressing that many (including myself) have yet to even begin that battle with authorities and insurance companies; that three years on, some will probably *still* be waiting two years from now.

That should be a wake-up call for all of New Zealand because, as Marlborough and Wellington earthquakes have recently demonstrated, none of us can afford to ignore the ramifications of disaster.

Abandonment, ruin, decay and emptiness can all stimulate our imaginations and fire us up at a creative level but there is no escaping the fact that these residential voids - laden with loss - come at a huge human cost. That cost may not have been in lives lost - I don't think anyone died in the suburbs, in a residential setting during any of the Christchurch earthquakes - but who is to say the loss of a home is not just as traumatic?

To me these empty spaces represent a sad pause, a silent hiatus in the evolution of Christchurch social history - a hyphen if you will, that bridges the gap between before and after (the earthquakes).

My natural inclination is to fill the voids with memories.

I layer them with meaning and in the deep, all pervasive silence, I stand there and imagine I can hear laughter.

Sometimes, that feels like the only thing you can do.

A Week of Rain

noreply@blogger.com (Adrienne Rewi) — Sun, 23 Jun 2013 04:01:00 +0000

We've had a week of rain, hail, sleet and snow in Christchurch and during that time, I've been more than a little transfixed by the effect its all had on the city. So today, my camera and I went to inspect - long after everyone else has already covered the worst of the elements but there was still plenty to see. In fact, it seemed to be the activity of the day. With a little sunshine, everyone was out walking, eyeing up the still swollen rivers and creeks.

Certainly the river that normally meanders at a gentle pace through Beckenham and Opawa (is it the Heathcote River perhaps?), was still a fast-flowing torrent lapping at the edges of gardens.

The paper-delivery girl stopped in her tracks.

The extensive surface flooding in South Hagley Park giving birth to a tangle of reflections

The black, bare branches looking slighting ominous and animate.

The South Hagley cricket pitch 'rained off.'

The riverside picnic tables stranded in the meddle of fast-flowing floodwater at Beckenham.

Roads closed all around Opawa.

Little Hagley Park in the north - the gaunt trunks of giant trees sleek and shiny with winter wet.

Opawa, where river and street merge

Making the most of extra water at Beckenham

And impossible for me not to refer the earthquakes at some level. Here, a reflective view of the ruins of the Catholic Basilica - always a sad sight.

"in a winter landscape - especially in a wood - there is the same kind of purity that the Greeks saw in the unclad human form..."

Once again from the top......

noreply@blogger.com (Adrienne Rewi) — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 04:13:00 +0000

It's been a while since I wandered our broken city taking photographs - got bored with it.

As I've noted here on previous occasions, there comes a point when I need time out.

But here are a few shots I took a couple of weeks ago when I wandered along the most recently opened section of the Red Zone. As always, I was taken by the materiality of things - the improvised sheets of plywood set against plaster or bricks, the 'shadows' left by demolished buildings, the clusters of ugly heating vents, now exposed for all to see.

I like the brutality of those solid concrete walls that were once shut away down alleys, or blocked from view by other buildings.

There are new words to discover - old words that is, newly revealed.

And the starkness of solo high rise that seems to teeter at odd angles.

There's the endless disarray of demolition sites and the wonder at how rapidly a city can change its face

And there are the chairs.

I've always loved chairs but in the wake of the Christchurch earthquakes, I've come to love them all the more for the unpredictable ways they have presented themselves, all over the city - out of place, out of kilter.... much like many of the city's people really.

Manchester Street Re-Opened

noreply@blogger.com (Adrienne Rewi) — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 04:08:00 +0000

This afternoon I strolled down Manchester Street - newly re-opened to traffic after the lifting of more of the Red Zone cordons. I wasn't the only one. Sightseers and Sunday drivers were out in force, to catch a glimpse of a part of the city they haven't been able to walk through for over two years - since the February 22, 2011 earthquake. I could write 24,000 words on the subject, but operating on the premise that a picture is worth a thousand words - and because I'm sick of writing about earthquakes - I bring a photographic study instead.

I think you'll agree, the place needs work.

Revisiting 'Brokenville'

noreply@blogger.com (Adrienne Rewi) — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 06:58:00 +0000

Theatre Royal Facade, Gloucester Street

It's been many weeks since I wandered around the inner city Christchurch Red Zone with my camera.

I had reached one of those saturation points that comes upon me after months of photographing the brokenness of this place.

When I set off early this morning, I didn't expect to find too many changes, and in the larger sense of things, that proved to be true. But after roaming this city throughout the two-and-a-half years since the first September 2010, 7.1 magnitude earthquake, I am always surprised b y what I discover in the detail of things.

Ruins-in-Waiting, taken from Cashel Street

Framed, Madras Street.

Streets I have walked a hundred times before, still have the potential to deliver surprises - some brand new, others that have been there all along, just waiting to be seen. We miss so much of what goes on around us.

We spend too much time, walking from place to place, looking through half-open eyes.

The inner city home of a friend

Building for Lease, As is, where is - Hereford Street

Feet First, Colombo Street

"Future that Way," Tuam Street

I suppose, like most people, I should find this wholesale destruction of our city distressing and depressing; but I've moved passed that. I do of course have moments of deep sadness for the way Christchurch has changed beyond recognition, but for the most part, I am now buoyed by a growing sense of excitement.

"A New Zealand Icon," For Sale, Tuam Street.

Not sure what's happening here - Lichfield Street.

Progress on Shigeru Ban's Cardboard Cathedral, Madras Street.

It's an excitement for the promise of the new and for the unpredictable and ongoing change.

Not everyone likes change.

I love it.

For me, cities should be about change and evolution. It would have been preferable of course, not to have had such dramatic change (and loss of life) forced upon us by the forces of nature but would conservative Christchurch ever have *really* looked at itself otherwise?

The Capri Club, viewed from Tuam Street

Vacant lots, Poplar Lane, Viewed from Tuam Street

A Gothic Remnant, Canterbury Provincial Chambers, Gloucester Street

"Let everything - almost everything - change with a will, in any city that you love. People gush and moan too much about the loss of ancient buildings of no special note - "landmarks" and "links with the past." In towns, as in human bodies, the only state of health is one of rapid wasting and repair."

C.E. Montague. "The Right Place."

Fence Tag, Tuam Street.

Vacant Lots, Gloucester Street

"Every City needs a Giraffe, Cashel Street

Any change, even a change for the better, always has its discomforts and drawbacks; but sometimes, having change forced upon us, makes us 'go to new places.' It forces us to think differently, to live our lives differently and, in the case of a city, to build differently. That's where the excitement lies for me.

A Girl and Her Rubble - Cashel Street

Memorial Stones, CTV site, Madras Street.

Life in Christchurch now is all about change. It's like living inside a kaleidoscope. Nothing is still. Every part moves (sometimes literally). Few things are constant.

No Entrance - with a Cabbage Tree, Hereford Street.

Early Sun on a Construction Site, Lichfield Street.

John Dewey. "Reconstruction in Philosophy."

Restart Mall, Oxford Terrace.

Danger, Keep Out. Oxford Terrace.

We're all changed in Christchurch and I hope we will all keep changing, just as I hope the city will keep changing. Nothing is meant to last forever.

We never know when the next change is going to occur, or how big or small it will be. We never know what unexpected opportunity is just around the corner. But I do know there are unexpected opportunities of every kind, lurking in every corner of Christchurch's broken body.

I celebrate that.

Barry's Provocative Unpublished Minutes - 164

noreply@blogger.com (Adrienne Rewi) — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 14:00:00 +0000

"Concerning Elephants and Rooms"

Another image from leading New Zealand printmaker, Barry Cleavin.

See more below.

Barry's Provocative Unpublished Minutes - 163

noreply@blogger.com (Adrienne Rewi) — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 14:00:00 +0000

"Anatomy of a Horse"

Another work in the ongoing series by one of New Zealand's leading printmakers, Barry Cleavin of Christchurch

Inspiration

noreply@blogger.com (Adrienne Rewi) — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 00:14:00 +0000

I have a sign on my office wall that says "Inspiration Can Come From Anywhere."

Lately though, Inspiration doesn't seem to be at my place.

That's inspiration for writing I mean - and by 'writing,' I mean 'other than journalism.'

I've spent decades wrestling with this dilemma. Some call it writer's block but I don't think I've ever suffered from that, not in any long-term or meaningful way. Years in journalism have taught me to 'write on command.' I can do that almost any time, anywhere. But when it comes to fiction, or non-fiction book writing, it's a whole other ball game. I can be as stumped as the next person.

But I do know this about myself.

I know that if I move away from my familiar environment, away from the city and into a rural environment where I can make space for the 'meditation,' wonderful things can happen.

So last weekend, I took one of those long and winding roads that remind me of my childhood and I opened that gate to daydreams, thought, memory and the sinuous entwining of all three.

I was probably about eight when I started riding away from home – not long after I got my first bike. I lived in the country and I would cycle for miles.

I still remember those days of carefree freedom with something close to bliss. I can still smell the hayfields, the honeysuckle and barberry hedges. I can still see the waving roadside grasses, the endless green fields and the wild pheasants that would fly out and send me wobbling across the road in fright.

I still have a vision of the games I played with the centre white lines, watching them fade away into the distant horizon, wondering what I would find when I finally got to that point that was, just then, an indiscernible haze, nothing more than a blur. I remembered turning corners into new roads - uncharted childhood landscapes filled with secrets, nervous fears and a constant wondering about what would unfold in front of me, who I might see, what I might find to take home as a souvenir of my immense and important journeys.

A coloured stone might do the trick, or a new leaf, a dead insect, a butterfly wing, a broken bird’s egg, or a hawk’s feather that I dreamed of turning into a magic quill that would write books for me.

It strikes me now, that every journey we have ever make is preparation for the next. More than that, it is preparation for the ‘now.’ Everywhere we have been, everything we have discovered along the way, every person we have ever met along those long and endless ‘roads’, has somehow brought us to this point, gifted us with the knowledge and courage we need to go on.

Sitting on a remote beach at dawn, watching the rising sun catch at the clouds, I remembered a childhood of lying on fresh grass, watching the clouds float by. I used to wonder who would be next to see them, after they had vanished from my view; I wondered if they saw the same fleeting 'pictures' that I made out of all that 'cumulus fluff.'

I thought of all the beaches I had stayed at as a child, as an adult.

I remembered a jumble of holidays that glued my childhood horror of getting lost in sand dunes, to the screaming panic of one of my own children, stung in the back by a wasp as we motored through Northland kauri forests.

And the sentence he screamed, now relegated to family lore

"Help, help, a wasp has put his foot in my back."

[He was three or four at the time]

When I sit on a beach, alone, I think of time and tides.

I think of the last time I may have been there.

I daydream about the ebb and flow of love affairs.

Of people past and present, who walk through memory.

I remember my childhood passion for collecting things.

For taking home those little feathery momentos, the sticks, the shells, the pebbles.

I still do it.

And in the act of doing it

Thoughts are loosened, ideas gather, words collide.

Alone, away from the distractions of daily life – phone calls, visitors, the nagging guilt of unwashed dishes, unironed clothes and lawns like unmown fields – I can focus on ‘inner things.’

Unable to view a pile of unanswered correspondence and unwritten magazine features, I can sift through remembered words, gathered sentences and deeply-stored memories, reshuffling them into new compositions with a life of their own.

In the act of remembering my childhood garden, thoughts 'grow.'

The act of nurturing my past enriches my present.

Forgotten nuggets of memory swell and fill out with a new knowledge, a new perception of what my childhood was really like; and how it has informed the person I am today.

It's so easy to let your life fill up with 'other stuff.'

Away from my own environment, I find the freedom to 'see ghosts,' to look back on an accumulation of stored moments - to bring them out, as you might bring out a favourite book, or a gathered shell, to be looked at afresh.

It's like shuffling half-formed ideas - always there, waiting - into some sort of new understanding, of yourself, of others.

The ideas, the memories - they're always there, stored

Like piles of wood

Just waiting for me to be in the right frame of mind to see them, to take them

To turn them into something that works, something that 'burns.'

I see life in the detail of things, in the ordinariness of the everyday.

I live for beauty.

I see it everywhere.

And in solitude, away from the demands and distractions of a modern life

I think more deeply about the way the light falls through the window

About the way darkness approaches, like a stranger in the street

About the bee on a flower that instantly snaps me back to childhood

I used to gather up all my writer’s lucky charms for a trip like this: my little brown book of notes, my little black book of notes, a new book for new notes, my folder full of scribbled notes on old scraps of paper, my pens – new, old and lucky, a stapler, my glasses, also lucky (as in ‘lucky to see without them’), paperclips, three small notebooks for scribbling notes on the run, everything in fact, that had surrounded me the last time I successfully wrote when I was away from home. I'd pack them all into my suitcase. It was about recapturing the mood I told myself, trying to justify the extra weight I would have to heft.

Sometimes I still take notes.

More often I take photographs of the things I know will stir me later

The things that will rustle through my memories and shake free a new awareness.

And I rely, more and more, on adding a new layer of memory.

Over the old

Too be turned over

Another time

To be remembered

When next I falter at a fictional beginning.

[All photographs were taken last weekend at Ōtanerito on Banks Peninsula]

Favourite Photos

noreply@blogger.com (Adrienne Rewi) — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 21:46:00 +0000

Three Christchurch Photographs

Personal Favourites

Taken before the earthquakes

Barry's Provocative Unpublished Minutes - 162

noreply@blogger.com (Adrienne Rewi) — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 14:00:00 +0000

"Avian Chimney Dweller"

Another work from leading New Zealand printmaker, Barry Cleavin.

Click on the tabs below to see more in this ongoing series

Barry's Provocative Unpublished Minutes - 161

noreply@blogger.com (Adrienne Rewi) — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 14:00:00 +0000

"Arms Race According to Rorsarch"

Another work in the ongoing series, by one of New Zealand's leading printmakers, Barry Cleavin