Not As We Know It

Jane Wilcox’s Twilight Trees

MARY MACPHERSON

JANE WILCOX from the Māhina series 2020
Digital photograph

Lockdown 2020 — that strange and restricted time — has turned out to have a few benefits. There is the discovery that we like working from home, that a whole lot of art is available online, and for some artists, the gift of time. For Jane Wilcox, Technical Services Manager at Massey University in Wellington, and sole parent, it gave her concentrated periods where, for once, she could work in depth on a photographic project.

Wilcox started with a Catching the light around my house series, which she posted daily on Instagram, but soon wanted to step into the landscape with her camera, and crucially, her flash. The series she stepped into is Māhina (twilight) where, in the hour before sunset, she photographed the trees and vegetation beside the long pathway near where she lives and in places like the Botanic and Ōtari-Wilton’s Bush Gardens.

In the liminal time when the sky deepens and the moon appears, she isolated fragments of trees, flowers and other vegetation using her flash to flatten the photographic plane and pick out cascades of falling leaves as well as voluptuous magnolia and rhododendron blossoms. The effect of highlighting details against sultry backgrounds and silhouettes of other trees is to transform the images into contained gothic-type worlds. It’s our vegetation, but not as we know it.

There is a wild mixture of exotic and indigenous plants; a ponga frond here, a cherry tree there, a macrocarpa, then a kōwhai. It reminded me of a recent walk in Wellington’s Botanic Garden. After enjoying the cool greenness of the bush walk, which contains pre-European specimens, I emerged in front of Tilia x europea or the European linden. Then onwards to the ‘pines and pōhutakawa’ hilltop, then over to the Australian garden.

Wilcox says the mixture of types in her work is deliberate. She feels the landscape of Aotearoa is populated with both indigenous and exotic plants and she wanted to include European species as a reference to her English heritage through her father. Seeing the lacy trails of leaves and bare branches, it is not surprising to learn that as a child, Aubrey Beardsley etchings were among her favourite images. Latterly the dark suggestive photographs by Australian- German Katrin Koenning have inspired her and similar work from Morganna Magee, another Australian. I thought too of Karl Maughan’s lush gardens and the glittering canvases of Reuben Paterson. For Wilcox, who has always loved landscape photography but never felt satisfied with conventional results, Māhina represents getting close to her spiritual sense of the land.

Her work will be published as between dog and wolf by Bad News Books in July, a series of eight Māhina zines and be part of the 2022 Courtenay Place lightbox series.

JANE WILCOX from the Māhina series 2020
Digital photograph

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