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Ecologies


Ecologies brings together a collection of Northland artists whose work explores different local environments and the ways in which we interact and relate to them. From the way in which we identify with the landscape to how we alter and reshape it, these artists employ a range of photographic processes that start from a personal investigation into ecological systems and result in a sharing and raising of awareness of things that can be easily taken for granted or hard to grasp. The changing landscape, our backyards, the built environment, the climate, agriculture, entomology. The exhibition aims to provoke thought about how we inhabit our environments and what our relationships with them look like.

Artists include Marcel Allen, Angela Rowe, Alan Squires, Ashleigh Zimmerman, Megan White, Lisa Clunie and Ellen Smith.

Many thanks to our exhibition sponsor, Creative Communities Whangārei, our partners, Auckland Festival of Photography, Creative Northland, Creative Practice, Nature Morte, Ellen Smith Photography, and Meg White_Art + Design.

Ecologies, writing by Angela Rowe, 2025

Urban mosses thrive in cracks and crevices in pathways and walls, pushing against and inhabiting the boundaries within human-made environments. These lush cushions of green exploit areas of moisture and collections of organic matter, responding to traces of behaviour and environmental conditions. In urban environments, these micro green spaces are both pushing against and reinforcing the concrete networks of pathways and infrastructure that hold us together in physical locations.

There are vast networks and systems that enable and complicate life on our planet. We are entangled in these webs; our activities work in dialogue, and where we are and how we are, really matters. Key questions are pondered and responded to in the Ecologies project: how does attention to ecology change our understanding of authorship, ownership, or control? How does artistic practice itself participate in a web of social, ecological, or cultural relationships? Is the making process one of disturbance, cultivation, or restoration? 

The artists in Ecologies share ways of viewing and experiencing systems thinking, revealing feedback loops, layers of complexity, and reciprocity within relationships. Static classifications of species and landscapes are unsettled, as language shifts toward dynamic and entangled understandings. Like urban mosses, these relational webs consume, enrich, undermine, and mimic systems in the un/natural world.

Alan Squires, Ecologies.

Edges and objects

Boundaries dissolve when organisms shift into previously unrelated spaces. Megan White’s work explores the tension between suburban development and adjacent scenic reserves in Aotearoa. Her practice examines interior and exterior views of forest ecosystems, alongside scenes of developed and neglected environments from their edges, using these thresholds as conceptual reference points. This collection of sites enables a merging of ecologically diverse scenes into representations of history, the present state, and potential futures. In her recent body of work, White turns attention beneath the mangrove canopy—to the often unseen ecosystems that exist below. Selected sections of mangrove forests, photographed across saline ecosystems in Tai Tokerau, are digitally extracted and rearranged onto block-colour backdrops sourced from Resene’s Top 20 House Colours 2024. The resulting compositions create visual tension between ecological and domestic spaces.

Ashleigh Zimmerman, Whare Ngaro (detail) 2024.

Community Ecology: Networks of Relation

In community ecology, attention centres on the relationships between species that coexist within shared environments. These relationships—competition, cooperation, parasitism, and mutualism—create the architecture of biodiversity. Likewise, the artworks here ask us to consider what it means to share space. Who or what is given room to grow? What patterns emerge when disparate elements are placed in relation?

Alan Squires shares this community-oriented lens. His photographic work explores the urban ecology of Whangārei, focusing on The Loop, an integrated pathway that traces and imperfectly encloses the city’s inner harbour. The Loop serves as a catalyst for civic pride, community connection, and urban vibrancy. Squires’ images examine the evolving relationship between built and natural environments, highlighting the bridges that structure the path, and the human and non-human relationships that have emerged through its development.

Whether through visual motifs, collaborative processes, or the tension between material presence and absence, these works foreground the ecological as relational—a constant negotiation between autonomy and interdependence.

Ellen Smith, Dead Insect Collection Chlorylphyl Print, 2024.

Tracing Flows and Exchanges through Ecosystem Modelling

Beyond the visible interactions of species, ecosystems are defined by invisible flows: the movement of nutrients, energy, carbon, and information. Ecosystem modelling traces how these flows shape structure, function, and resilience over time.

Lisa Clunie’s wet_land reflects on the altered hydrology of the Hikurangi Repo. Once one of the largest wetlands in Aotearoa, the area has been drained and modified into farmland, radically changing its function and value. Known colloquially as "The Swamp," others advocate for the name “Hikurangi Floodplains”—a term that acknowledges the land’s vital role in storing water, supporting biodiversity, and regulating flow. In response to climate change and extreme weather events, Clunie’s work reconsiders wetlands as "the kidneys of the earth"—important sponges in a complex ecological system. 

Insects, which constitute more than three-quarters of all known animal species, are essential to global ecological balance yet are in steep decline (Milman, 2022). Ellen Smith’s delicate chlorophyll prints model the slow fade of presence. Her practice is an act of ecological remembrance, focusing on the often-overlooked lives of insects. Smith collects, identifies, and photographs these small bodies before exposing their images directly onto leaves, using sunlight to create fragile, ephemeral prints. These works are quietly metabolic—they register time, energy, and loss through the material logic of fading.

Lisa Clunie, Complex Systems (Snag) 2019-2020.

Complex Systems and Network Theory: Emergence and Instability

The natural world does not operate as a linear machine. Instead, it behaves as a complex adaptive system—where simple interactions can generate unexpected outcomes, where networks self-organise, and where small disturbances can lead to systemic transformation.

Blending photography and uku, Ashleigh Zimmerman’s work explores personal narratives of whakapapa and the complex relationships between tinana and whenua. Her process and creative practice speaks to layered belonging and interconnectedness within te ao Māori. Her work embraces the unpredictability of material processes and genealogical time, expressing her exploration of her inner world of self, belonging and purpose.

Many of the works in Ecologies embrace instability and emergence—through open-ended systems, responsive materials, or layered networks of meaning. There is a shared attention to what arises when materials, makers, and viewers interact. And a quiet warning: even the most resilient systems contain the potential for tipping points. 

This balance plays out in Angela Rowe’s project Keep Care, if birds can see blue explores mending as both metaphor and material practice. Beginning with fallen birds’ nests, the work uses visible mending techniques to restore and alter these structures. Though they may become stronger or more beautiful, the nests are ultimately rendered unusable—playfully revealing the limits and unexpected consequences of attempts to solve environmental problems with human-centric ‘fixes’. The process is documented through still and moving images, positioning mending as a gesture toward internal repair, care, and the limits of restoration.

Angela Rowe, If birds can see blue, 2024.

Together, the artists in Ecologies offer lenses through which systems thinking can be felt and experienced—revealing feedback loops, fragile ecologies, and relational entanglements. They invite us to reflect on how we inhabit and shape the networks around us, whether visible or invisible. By engaging with ideas from theoretical ecology, the exhibition offers more than metaphor. It suggests that artistic practice itself might be understood ecologically—not just thematically, but structurally. Each artwork becomes part of a living system: contingent, entangled, and responsive to context. In this view, creation is not an isolated act but a kind of ecological performance—a gesture within the larger choreography of a changing world.

In recent decades, ecological thinking has shifted from fixed categories to dynamic understandings of systems: webs of relation, flows of energy, and reciprocal behaviours. In this exhibition, the works can be read as part of a larger inquiry into how life—biological, cultural, and social—organises itself within shared environments. The following conceptual frameworks from theoretical ecology may offer ways of reading the material, spatial, and relational dynamics at play.

The initial enquiry for the Ecologies project began with Marcel Allen, and a desire to step back into a collaborative project with a network of curious artists. Allen sought to understand the hidden world of mycelium, the infrastructure that produces the fruiting bodies of fungi. His research and foraging for fungi began as an attempt to identify and document different species growing in his home environment of Ngahuha Gardens, and later as a grow-your-own enthusiast. As he delved deeper, a more profound awareness took root: fungi are not only edible curiosities, but crucial to life as we know it. With the ability to survive in space, thrive in radioactive environments, and inhabit bodies, soils, foods, and air, fungi are agents of both transformation and resilience. 

Meg White, Mangrove Assemblage No.3_ Grey Frais, 2025.

Ecological Practice: A System of Relations

Ecologies invites us to feel systems thinking—through art that is sensorial, conceptual, and deeply relational. Whether tracing flows, unsettling boundaries, or surfacing unseen dynamics, these works hold a mirror to the ecological conditions of our time. They do more than illustrate; they participate in systems. By drawing from ecological theory, the exhibition suggests that artistic practice itself might be understood ecologically—not just thematically, but structurally. Each artwork is a node in a living system: contingent, entangled, and responsive to context. Creation, here, is not an isolated act but an ecological gesture—part of the wider choreography of a world in flux.

Notes

Milman, O. The Insect Crisis - The Fall of the Tiny Empires that Run the World.  Atlantic Books, London, 2022.

Marcel Allen, Aurora Pleurotus pulmonarius, 2025.

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