'Clearing' - Ellie Smith Exhibition @ OREXART

Whangarei-based photographer Ellie Smith’s new exhibition offers starkly beautiful black and white images shot in the pine forests of Northland.

In many of these photographs, the tall, austere trunks and cloud-like branches of the pines are interrupted by colonial interlopers: power lines, cows grazing, a survey tripod, a gleaming white church, cats, even people.

And, as Ellie notes, pine trees are themselves colonial interlopers of a sort: introduced to New Zealand by the early settlers, they are “like possums, a symbol of our colonial invasion”. Images of light slipping through dark massed pines and illuminating grassy forest floors are set against images littered with fallen branches and stumps, stacked with neat piles of logs: images of destruction, perhaps, but also images of ‘clearing’.

Yet the lure of pine forests, for Ellie, is not so easily or logically dismissed: “I made huts in the pine trees as a child… I remember anxious old-world stories of lost and enchanted children.  I am still warmed by the smell of Christmas.”

Ellie Smith was shortlisted for the 2009 Wallace Art Awards and was a finalist in the 2005 Norsewear Art Awards. She tutors photography at Northland Polytechnic and has coordinated several community art projects.