Holy Cow

These works look at the rise (and rise) of dairy farming in New Zealand. They are part of a series or drawings and paintings I started because issues around land use and the environment are part of my long-running interest in place.

Dairying has been good for New Zealand, but I'm not sure that that means we want the whole country turned into a dairy farm. The furore over proposed large-scale dairy farming in the Mckenzie Basin brought these concerns into focus in a way not seen to date. Three of the biggest concerns for me with respect to this style of dairying are over water use, effluent disposal and the use of imported feed. If the land can't sustain a particular use then there has to be a big question mark over whether that's an appropriate use of the land.

In the broadest sense my focus is the uncertainty of place. Place so often underscores who we are and where we think we belong, both in a physical sense as well as in a political or social sense. We have perceived of place as grounded and therefore stable, but this stability is under threat from our contemporary nomadic lifestyles, the virtual world of cyberspace, and a resource-hungry world.