‘Bed Uncovered’ Installation 2023.

(Audio) ‘Incoming’ Britney Saywell 2023.

Video Work ‘People Watcher’ Britney Saywell 2023.

Talk Week: Contextual statement alongside installation.

This installation sits as an iteration in a year long series of gallery installations and site visits to Northland wetland, along the Turanga river.

My art practice explores the relationship between the human and inhuman. I am a facilitator of conversation between audience and the inspired site (landscape). An experimental method ‘conjectural recording’ rests at the heart of my practice. When I am experiencing the land, I don’t come with a preconceived idea in my mind towards material or site. Rather, I let the material dictate my recording. I respond to the land.

Acknowledging the animate qualities of inhuman material such as engagement in memory, experience, movement and the metaphysical. I may use a range of recording modes such as collecting, audio, video, photography and responsive writings and melodies. These conjectural recordings build an archive of site.

In addition, I am interested in the further conversation audience can have with a landscape, as I work with the potential of found/ collected material. This may look like heating, drying, and wet processes.

Conceptually I am drawn to the in-between space of New Zealand wetlands. This installation ‘Bed Uncovered’2023 in particular pulls in a question around the history of the riverbed running through the wetlands. Hosting space for the plausible evidence of dead bodies sunk in the wetland.