Grids in Nature
Photographs by Georgia Carr
CLARE GEMIMA
GEORGIA CARR Wharf rd 2022 Inkjet on silk matte, 280 x 400 mm.
Georgia Carr’s Greenhills, Long Drive, Wharf rd, Home Bay and Prospect play with the torment of imagined restrictions and ungranted permissions. Rejoicing at the idea that none of her compositions could ever authentically translate on a digital map, the photographer’s documentation of nature’s ‘grids’ similarly reinforces a strong sense of humour and curiosity towards her image’s non-threatening environments, and constructed limitations of access. Her photographs lend as inquisitive answers to questions, such as ‘how are you going to know until you get there?’ and ‘what could be the worst possible thing to happen anyway?’
Carr admires and appreciates Solomon Mortimer’s photographic sensibilities, most specifically his ‘nice’ observational sensitivity. In his 2011 project A Recent Encounter, he photographed my friend Laura, a regular Karangahape Road face, but the good type that you wouldn’t mind running into over and over again, even if you’d just said your goodbye a minute or two ago. Her small frame sits compact on a bench, her arms slumpily crossed just enough to meet her oppositely positioned feet. Laura takes up zero room, but she can stink out the entire bus stop with one smoke. Mortimer captures a no-hands (so eyes are stinging) ciggy break, and a full of fuck, pretending to not give a damn smug. Why should I recall Laura in any other way? Georgia Carr’s own approach to image-making feels like a kind of documentation between her two rural, sentimental scenes and, much like Mortimer’s construction of Laura, one could only imagine a sense of peace and bliss while looking at her photographs, even when heavily advised against, or precarious warning signs pervade.
Observing Laura was not the first paddle pop moment of nostalgia experienced throughout my deep delve into Carr’s photographs. Shot over the span of the last three years, these five images explore her relationship between Coromandel, her hometown, and the Auckland suburb of Ōrākei, where she currently lives. Unprepared for geographically charged memories thrust upon me, it became more and more evident that I am (a) extremely far away from home writing this, and then I suddenly realised that (b) as a person who grew up in Aotearoa who now lives in New York, I definitely read signs in order to survive, or at least mitigate a high probability of danger and risk every walk home.
To be advised to stay out, or not enter somewhere in New Zealand, never seems justified with any large, adversarial consequences that countries elsewhere legitimately pose threats of. Cheekily, Carr’s series romanticises the idea that the potential doom lurking behind a large farm gate reading ‘Keep Out’, may merely resemble a reasonably nice-looking pair of heels abandoned from a wild Mission Bay night before.
GEORGIA CARR Long Drive 2021 Inkjet on silk matte, 280 x 400 mm.
GEORGIA CARR Prospect 2023 Inkjet on silk matte, 280 x 400 mm.
GEORGIA CARR Greenhills 2021 Inkjet on silk matte, 280 x 400 mm.
GEORGIA CARR Home Bay 2022 Inkjet on silk matte, 280 x 400 mm.