Urban Green Space

Loretta Riach

18/5/23 – 10/6/23

The ghosts of Gondwana intermingle with urban sprawl. Glaciers pass through parking lots– extinct birds materialise in your bedroom. Past landscapes, or future epochs, sit alongside fossilised remnants, trinkets, and souvenirs. There is a plaque which reads “SHORELINE 1840” embedded in the concrete. It is possible to cross the road and find yourself standing in an ancient stream bed– meanwhile, eels are busy commuting beneath the footpath. 

𓆟࿐ೃ˙𖦹 ⋆꙳ ໑ ᮫࣭ ꩜ ｡⋆༄ 

In Urban Green Space, the tailings of a wetland and fragments of urban strata are washed up together by a rising tide. Objects dislocated from their point of origin form new collections. Landscapes are painted, flooded over, and drained, before reemerging water-logged and salt-laden onto canvas. In this suspended state, these works reflect upon local histories, and untethered futures. Drawing from sites in Te Whanganui-a-Tara made inaccessible or unrecognisable by colonial land degradation, and from practices of water dowsing, they ask how we can become newly levelled with the land– how can we learn to see ghosts?

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Loretta Riach is a Te Whanganui-a-Tara based artist and writer, whose practice investigates interactions between landscape and timescales, engaging with materials and sites specific to historical narratives. Their multidisciplinary practice includes painting and sculpture, as well as a body of written work. They graduated from Massey University Toi Rauwharangi in 2022 with a BFA (Hons), and are a facilitator at play_station. They also work as a bookseller and a gallery minder. Urban Green Space is their first solo show. 

Design by Zoe Hannay

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