[June 29 – July 16]
In 2011 a 6.3 earthquake struck Christchurch and its surrounds. The deadly fault lay shallow beneath the Port Hills I had lovingly climbed for years.
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In 2016 the feeling towards my former home had changed, as I watched the sombre anniversary from Melbourne. My experience of that quake and the thousands that followed had buried themselves deep into my memory, with time becoming secondary to the juddered emotions left behind.
A few months prior to the anniversary, the relationship with my mother was severed. Once a problem consoled by the hills, it was a loss left unresolved. The sensation was quixotic and whilst wrestling with the confusing discomfort, subconscious glances revealed I had replaced my mother figure for the landscape – desperately seeking a geo-psychic closeness that mountains have always offered.
The landscape I longed for no longer exists; the comfort once provided is now perilously unpredictable. Disquiet charts this dissonance, using the earthquake to narrate my experience of physical rupture and psychological irresolution.
Charlotte Watson, 2016
A catalogue essay of Disquiet by Kent Wilson is available for download – please click here
