Lise Jansen-Luke from Waipapa Taumata Rau, The University of Auckland, Te Pare School of Architecture and Planning is a finalist for her project 'One of these is not like the other: Our mark on an eroding coastline'.
Project description
Centred on an eroding bank at the top of the South Island, this project is a close reading of the dynamic transformation of a small site, which is indicative of what much of Aotearoa’s coastal landform is currently undergoing.
The Awaroa bank has lost more than seven metres of land over the past five years, despite ongoing efforts to retain it with the construction of a sea wall and steps. Through a variety of media – photography, charcoal drawing and printmaking – the primary outcome of this project is a series of wood and lino blocks, etched aluminium plates, and the prints taken from them. These multiple ink-on-paper impressions are a record of the land-water intertidal zone. What results from this collation of materiality, method and craft subverts its conventional use in architectural drawing.
Through the dissolving of surface and the removal of substance, the printmaker’s craft parallels, reveals and critiques the physical transformations involving disappearance, instability and imprecision. This thesis lays boundaries for what impressions our architectural reactions to change leave behind on the landscape, bringing to light the invisible past lives of the land’s movement. Using craft, I further my own relationship to the sea wall and how it is affecting a landscape I hold so dear.
Jury citation
This highly personal project juxtaposes decay with beauty, and counters erosion with corrosion, while bearing witness to environmental destruction.
Through multiple ink-on-paper impressions, the maker explores the transformation of a coastal site from the forces of nature. The thesis is an ongoing record of the shifting intertidal zone, the architectural response to this changing landscape and the maker’s own relationship to the site.
This is a successful exploration of the alternative techniques that can be used to document and understand a place. The craft of printmaking explores and interprets a changing landscape, the impacts of those changes and what architecture leaves behind.
