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Landscape: One Forest, Two Dogs, Three Boats (2007)

Michel Tuffery and Jim Vivieaere share Cook Island Maori and Tahitian ancestry, Michel’s mother is Samoan and Jim’s great grandfather is Chinese. They are multi media artists that live and work in New Zealand. Their disciplines have enabled them to form relationships and establish a reputation outside of and within their own Pacific Islander art community. This project at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts 2007 was approached in a similar manner to their first collaboration, “Pallawah Pasifika” 1995, a site specific time based installation in Tasmania, Australia..

 

To locate a position for this installation, co-ordinates were measured from the apex between the two existing sculptures and the interior area that was formed became an oblique reference to the Pacific Ocean that triangulates New Zealand, Hawaii and Rapanui.

 

Small research into the history of Kaohsiung triggered the artists to make a “bamboo forest” an acknowledgement to Takao, the literal translation of the city’s original name in the 17th C. Varying lengths of bamboo were ‘planted’ directly into the ground, enabling the artists to consider the forest’s eventual deterioration and collapse.

 

The topsoil lifted from the forest floor was shaped into a grass mound that echoes the double footprint pattern of a “vaka” the Polynesian seafaring vessel, configured by the layer of white shingle and the black shards of charcoal. 
 
Two indigenous dogs have been replicated as a tribute to their territorial presence and their daily gatherings. They are the “kaitiaki,” the caretakers of the Neiweipi Cultural Park.



Coconuts rest at the base of the bamboo forest, conceptually taking root like a rotating crop, offering the “tou go” a replacement shelter and refuge.

Author Jim Vivieaere ( Curator)