Clinic of Phantasms: Writings 1994-2002

Clinic of Phantasms: Writings 1994-2002
by Giovanni Intra
Edited by Robert Leonard
Foreword by Chris Kraus and Mark von Schlegell Introduction by Andrew Berardini


Giovanni Intra - Clinic of Phantasms: Writings 1994–2002“Everything you read about Los Angeles is true. The city adapts to its own mythology. It’s such a ludicrously discussed place that I always feel slightly idiotic in my attempts to produce a serious discourse about it. Raves in the desert, however, are superb. And ecstasy is a great drug. Also, if you hadn’t heard, music sounds better when you’re high. And the desert surrounding LA is wondrous.” — Giovanni Intra, LA Politics

Artist, gallerist, and writer Giovanni Intra’s inventive approach to art writing provides a guide to the New Zealand and Los Angeles art scenes of his era.

Before his early death in 2002, Giovanni Intra enjoyed a rollercoaster ride through the art world. He was an artist and gallerist — cofounding two legendary galleries, the artist-run space Teststrip in Auckland and China Art Objects Galleries in Los Angeles — as well as a writer. Clinic of Phantasms provides a guide to the New Zealand and Los Angeles art scenes of the day, including texts on key artists from New Zealand (John Hurrell, Fiona Pardington, Denise Kum, Ava Seymour, Ann Shelton, Gavin Hipkins, Daniel Malone, and Slave Pianos) and Los Angeles (Charles Ray, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Dave Muller, Evan Holloway, John McCracken, and Julia Scher). What makes Intra’s work of enduring significance is his inventive approach to art writing, which was informed by his interest in punk, surrealism, and Daniel Paul Schreber, the famous case study in paranoia and hallucination. This volume features writing on Intra from Chris Kraus and Mark von Schlegell, Andrew Berardini, Roberta Smith, Tessa Laird, Will Bradley, Joel Mesler, and Robert Leonard.

Clinic of Phantasms is an invaluable compendium of writings, and having an opportunity to read them is a gift. The mad intelligence of Intra, and the love he generated in others, shine through. The volume is a gesture of respect by a group of people joining forces to gather the texts, contribute the introductions and bring the project to life in a beautiful way.
Jennifer Bornstein in Contemporary Hum

He emerged the radically elegant punk, whip-crack smart and charming as hell… The hilarious honesty and sharp intelligence of Giovanni was to me a breeze, a knife, a wonder.
Andrew Berardini in Metro, Everything You Read About Giovanni Intra is True

Cover: photograph by Monty Adams Allannah wears Studded Suit by Giovanni Intra, 1994. Styled by Kirsty Cameron and Rachel Churchward.

Cover: photograph by Monty Adams
Allannah wears Studded Suit by Giovanni Intra, 1994.
Styled by Kirsty Cameron and Rachel Churchward.

Card-cover with flaps, section-sewn PUR glued | 240 pages  235mm x 182mm Portrait, B&W illustrations
ISBN 978-1-63590-165-8
Published by Bouncy Castle and Semiotext(e).

RRP $35

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LA Botanical

LA Botanical
Joyce Campbell
Foreword by Dr Susan Ballard, essay by Tessa Laird

LA Botanical is a series of ambrotype photographs of plant specimens found in the greater Los Angeles area. It was conceived by the multidisciplinary artist Joyce Campbell in the wake of Hurricane Katrina which devastated the Gulf Coast of Louisiana in 2005. The aftermath, particularly the inability and unwillingness of the Federal Government to respond to the crisis in flooded New Orleans, highlighted the vulnerability of a populace stranded in the face of natural, and human induced calamity in the world’s most powerful nation. As a mother raising her young child in a sprawling American city Campbell was compelled to ask: when the supply chain is disrupted and the supermarkets are empty, and there is no sign of aid reaching you, how can ‘art’ be useful? 

Campbell was raised on pastureland dotted with remnants of native bush inland from Wairoa township, on Aotearoa New Zealand’s rural East Coast. Her family were farmers, botanists and gardeners. Upon migrating to Los Angeles in 1999, she observed a fundamentally alien relationship between the city and its vegetation. Plants that had been introduced by waves of immigrants for food, fuel or medicine had gradually run wild across the city scape, the knowledge of their utility lost to time and neglect induced by a form of industrialized capitalism that was both aggressive and immersive. This book sets out to reveal the breadth of attributes ascribed to the weeds of Los Angeles via the enchantment of its seductive contents: plants rendered ethereal by the wet-plate photographic process that emerged simultaneous with the city itself.

Tessa Laird, in her essay within this volume, calls this book “. . . a poisoner’s handbook, a herbalist’s cure-all, a shaman’s bundle, a gardener’s guide, a botanist’s field manual, an artist’s scrapbook.” It can be all these things. This book is multidisciplinary in its scope, but it exists primarily as an artwork.

The first-edition was published in 2007, to accompany the exhibition LA Botanical at G727 – a Los Angeles gallery dedicated to generating dialogue via artistic representations and interpretations of the urban landscape.

This 2022 second-edition reissue by Rim Books, published on the occasion of the exhibition at Two Rooms gallery in Aotearoa New Zealand and featuring two extra plates, is now reproduced in duotone with a new foreword by Dr. Susan Ballard reflecting on the intervening years of changing climate, and new covers, hand-printed on a vintage Asbern letter-press by the artist in twenty distinct botanical iterations, with edition ranging from 14 – 30 copies each, all individually numbered and autographed by the artist. 

“A lot has happened in the intervening years. From 2007-2009 California was in drought, with the first ever state-wide proclamation of emergency. Not long after, 2011-2017 presented one of the longest recorded droughts in the United States: water restrictions were mandated, lawns were left unwatered and many millions of plants and trees died. The drought was accompanied by the very worst wildfires imaginable. Fanned by Diablo winds, the deadliest to human life and the most destructive was the November 2018 Camp fire in Butte County that destroyed the town of Paradise, killing 85 people, and scorching 153,336 acres of land. Unimaginable, and yet true. The hazards have not gone away. On the 22 September 2022 the Los Angeles Times reported that “California is so hot and dry that not even soaking rain can ease fall fire peril.”

In this context, Campbell’s LA Botanical remains a document of survival. LA Botanical is a contemporary herbal: a record of plants and their uses — edible, medicinal, weapon, stimulant, building material — sourced from the urban environment of a sprawling and luminous city. As such LA Botanical is a tool of awareness: eat this, drink this, sniff here, stroke there, listen, don’t touch. The series offers sensory and visible evidence of the Anthropocene: the new geological age where elemental planetary relationships are rendered unpredictable and deadly.”

From the foreword by Dr Susan Ballard.

Hand printed card-cover, perfect bound | 90 pages (duotone offset)
ISBN 978-1-99-116521-3
Publication: 15 December 2022

RRP $60

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Please choose the desired cover and name the plant in the notes in your order. Otherwise a random choice of available cover will be sent.

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Motutapu: Benjamin Work & Brendan Kitto

Motutapu
Benjamin Work & Brendan Kitto
Foreword by Zoe Black, essays by Pita Turei, Paul Johansson, Stan Wolfgramm and the artists
Designed by Shaun Naufahu and Giordano Zatta

Presented as an exhibition at Te Uru and as this publication, MOTUTAPU is the conclusion of a four-year journey by artist Benjamin Work and photographer Brendan Kitto. This project looks at the shared history of Motutapu (sacred island) throughout Moana Oceania – including Tongatapu, Rarotonga and at the entrance to the Waitematā Harbour here in Tāmaki Makaurau. Motutapu is a place of sanctuary. Positioned at the entrance of great harbours, straddling the open ocean and the mainland, it serves as a gateway for navigators arriving and departing on voyages. The lifting of tapu and making things noa took place on Motutapu, allowing navigators to continue with their journey back to their closest kāinga, even if it was generations later.

Work and Kitto’s inquiry into Motutapu was initially centred around the shared name. What soon became apparent was a deeper connection to their own hohoko/ʻakapapa (genealogy) as they travelled to three of the Motutapu locations and connected with key knowledge holders. Motutapu has become a metaphor for Work and Kitto as a starting point for these personal journeys. Through Work’s paintings and Kitto’s photographs of their journeys, combined with the introductions to the three Motutapu locations by Pita Turei, Paul Johansson and Stan Wolfgramm the book offers, for the extended diaspora of Moana Oceania, a way for reconnection and reconciliation and as a reminder of what joins communities across time and space.

“Motutapu reminds me of the Tongan practice of Tauhi vā (to nurture or maintain relational space), as a metaphor of this sacred in-between space, an island straddled between the deep moana and the fonua of the mainland . . . When Brendan and I first embarked on this journey we were unaware of where this would lead us, but we now know this was a journey of restoration, healing and connection – to moana, fonua and ultimately with ‘Otua.”

Benjamin Work

“. . . Pita Turei, Paul Johansson and Stan Wolfgramm, who generously offered to guide interactions with each island, . . . The stories imparted by each knowledge-holder were offered through worldviews that leave space for multiplicities of knowledge, championing shared understandings that centre the question ‘What do you know it to mean?’. Their collective research offers an appreciation of three locations that have immense importance personally, while respectfully leaving space for others to tell their stories of these lands.”

From the foreword by Zoe Black

RRP $70.00

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Card-cover, perfect bound | 176 pages (indigo 130gsm Satin Matt) Cover (270gsm Bagdad Brown) 203mm x 254mm portrait
Limited edition of 250
ISBN 978-1-99-116520-6
Publication: August 2022

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Motutapu: Benjamin Work & Brendan Kitto Book Launch, 2pm 6th August 2022, Te Uru.

Motutapu: Benjamin Work & Brendan Kitto Book Launch, 2pm 6th August 2022, Te Uru.

The exhibition MOTUTAPU, at Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery (11 June – 11 September 2022) will be completed by the launch of the book of the same title by Benjamin and Brendan, at 2pm, 6th of August at Te Uru, 420 Titirangi Road. All invited.

photo: Brendan kitto
photo: Brendan kitto
photo: Brendan kitto

Motutapu: Benjamin Work and Brendan Kitto.
With foreword by Zoe Black, essays by Pita Turei, Paul Johansson, Stan Wolfgramm and the artists. 176pp soft cover, 203mm x 254mm portrait, designed by Shaun Naufahu and Giordano Zatta and published by Rim Books. Limited first edition of 250 copies.

Closing Time: photographs from the Hotel Kiwi 1967 – 1975

Closing Time: photographs from the Hotel Kiwi 1967 – 1975
Gary Baigent, John Fields and Max Oettli
Featuring texts by Elizabeth Eastmond, Ted Spring and the photographers

This limited edition zine-style photobook feature the photographs made at the bars of Hotel Kiwi from the archives of three photographers, who have all, in their own way, contributed to the development of early contemporary art photography in New Zealand.

Hotel Kiwi was situated at the corner of Wellesley and Symonds Streets in Auckland – close to the University and the Elam School of Fine Arts. Described in The Pub-Goer’s Guidebook (1966) as “Built almost entirely of formica and rubberised floor tiles, with the whole place giving out a general lavatorial atmosphere, it surely represents all that a pub should not be . . . The only feature of the place that is at all remarkable – and the only reason for giving it a ½ an award are the barmen. They are possibly the best we encountered anywhere.”

Max Oettli found employment as a bartender at Hotel Kiwi after graduating from University of Auckland in the late 1960s. He carried his Leica camera on the job, photographing the varied patrons of the old and new, around the time ‘six o’clock swill’ was scrapped to more civilised 10pm closing. As well as the Hotel being the go-to student bar, artists and photographers – many associated with the art school – frequented the bar and are captured in this booklet. Max is joined by fellow ‘New Photographers’ Gary Baigent and John Fields, (a title coined by Athol McCredie in his exhibition, The New Photography at Te Papa), who photographed their friends and acquaintances at Hotel Kiwi at the time.

Together, they immortalise the punters, photographers, artists and poets as well as art dealers in action: Glenn Busch, Simon Buis, Allan Leatherby, Paul Gilbert, Garry Colebrook; Colin McCahon, Pat Hanly, Peter Eyley, Harry Wong; Sue Crockford and Rodney Kirk Smith, just to name a few.

This book also features texts by Elizabeth Eastmond, who lectured in the Art History department and Ted Spring, then a student at Elam recollecting their time spent at ‘the Kiwi’, in conjunction with field notes and recollections from the three photographers.

“Here, is the wisdom and failings of age, the impetuosity and rudeness of youth, all jammed into a room, thick with smoke and drumming with noise. Conversations are a spectrum in themselves ranging from worn clichés and small talk to nuclear physics, with plenty of spread thighs and cock jumbled in from both sexes.” From John Fields’ dairy, 21 February 1969.

Gary Baigent is a key figure in the emerging moment of contemporary New Zealand photography of the late 1960s. Born in Wakefield, Nelson, in 1941 he majored in painting at the Canterbury University School of Fine Arts, Christchurch from 1960 to 1962. Baigent began working on The Unseen City: 123 photographs of Auckland, a book on Auckland’s urban life, published in 1967, with its contrasty, grainy images shot on the streets, in backyards and pubs, on the wharves and in student flats. The book was polarising but it also helped stimulate a new style of photography.

John Fields (1938-2013) was born in Massachusetts, USA and was educated in Rockport, a New England artists’ colony. He learned to photograph while in the US Navy and became a commercial photographer in the early 1960s before working as a specialist in electron microscope imaging at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He emigrated to New Zealand in 1966 to continue working in this sphere at the University of Auckland. He also brought an expectation that photography was better recognised within the arts in his adopted country. To this end in 1970, he organised a cooperatively published booklet of the work of ten contemporary photographers, Photography: A visual dialect – the first such publication in New Zealand. He was also responsible for one of the first exhibitions of contemporary photography at a dealer gallery: a group exhibition at Barry Lett Galleries in 1972.

Max Oettli was born in Switzerland in 1947 and migrated to New Zealand with his family in 1956. He was brought up in Hamilton and was a trainee press photographer at the Waikato Times over university vacations from 1966 to 1969. He applied this experience to his work on the student newspaper Craccum while he studied English, history and art history at the University of Auckland. From 1970 to 1975 Oettli was a technical instructor in film and photography at the University of Auckland Elam School of Fine Arts. For some of this time, he was also the founding president of PhotoForum, a group advocating for and promoting expressive photography.

(Biographies are extracts from the Te Papa website)

RRP $40.00

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Soft-cover, saddle stitched | 56 pages (indigo uncoated 100gsm)
285x 210 mm | Limited edition of 150
ISBN 978-0-9951184-9-2
Publication: March 2022

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Jellicoe & Bledisloe

Jellicoe & Bledisloe
David Cook

When David Cook moved to Hamilton East, he was drawn to the colourful and creative lives of his neighbours. With camera in hand, he explored everything from front-yard mechanics to Sunday roasts, creating an intimate documentary of a State Housing suburb in the 1990s, moments before gentrification set in. In this energetic photobook, we look back twenty-five years to see burgeoning issues of relevance today: housing, bi-cultural relations, social welfare, and freshwater quality, all brought to us through the lens of daily life.

The title, Jellicoe & Bledisloe, is a reference to the local street names, commemorating New Zealand Governors General from the early twentieth century. Reflecting on this colonial heritage, Cook writes an engaging first-person account of the suburb, featuring a conversation with Ngaati Wairere historian Wiremu Puke. Together they unearth suppressed histories and rewrite our understanding of the Waikato landscape.

Te Papa Tongarewa holds a significant collection of photographs from this series. The work is also featured in an exhibition Jellicoe & Bledisloe: Hamilton in the 90s – David Cook at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery / Te Pūkenga Whakaata, Wellington (24 Feb – 15 May 2022).

David Cook’s photo-documentaries deal with communities in transition. Publications include Lake of Coal: the Disappearance of a Mining Township (finalist in the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards), Meet me in the Square: Christchurch 1983-1987 (winner of the 2015 MAPDA Exhibition Catalogue Award – major) and River Road: Journeys through Ecology.

David Cook interviewed by Lynn Freeman in Standing Room Only

RRP $50.00

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hardback | 108 pages
245 x 200 mm
ISBN 978-0-9951184-8-5
Publication: February 2022

Design: Sam Fraser and David Cook

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Exhibition and book

Jellicoe & Bledisloe: Hamilton in the 90s – David Cook

  • Wednesday, 23 February 2022 10:00 am – Sunday, 15 May 2022 11:00 am
  • New Zealand Portrait Gallery Te Pūkenga Whakaata Shed 11, 60 Lady Elizabeth Lane Wellington New Zealand (map)

When photographer David Cook moved into Hamilton East, he was drawn to the colourful, creative and chaotic lives of his neighbours. With camera in hand, he explored back-yard mechanics to Sunday roasts, inventing an intimate documentary of a State Housing suburb in the 90s, moments before gentrification set in.

Books will be available from this site from February 25th.

The New Zealand Portrait Gallery opening.

Kōwhai and the Giants

KŌWHAI AND THE GIANTS

Kate Parker
Mary Eagan Publishing

Kowhai first appeared from the golden glow of a beautiful flower… and her voice was the rain and the sea and the cry of a bird.’ Follow Kowhai as she discovers a tiny seed’s hope to build a great forest.

Debut children’s author Kate Parker is a visual artist and theatre maker who is inspired to support positive environmental change on our planet. Here she creatively shares her vision of reforesting Aotearoa, one seedling at a time.

Kowhai and the Giants is a bitter/sweet story about the decimation of Aotearoa’s mighty forests following human habitation. But it is also a story of hope. While Kowhai may be small and alone, her actions will bring about change and soon, she will be joined by others.

“When you go to nature and you take care, you will be reimbursed with energy. I always felt the presence of beings in the forests where I grew up. Kowhai represents these beings in some way, committed to the preservation of the natural world. We are all a part of this. We can all be kaitiaki, it is in fact our responsibility (to be caretakers for our natural surroundings) and when we take this on in any way we can, positive change happens. Even in a city you can support environmental projects. If we can support Aotearoa’s native plant diversity to flourish, then we are supporting so many native birds, insects and fish. This diversity feeds the land and cleanses its waters. It sustains us.” — Kate Parker

Kowhai and the Giants asks the reader to listen with all their senses to their natural surroundings and to discover Kowhai’s call for themselves. A wise and beautifully told fable, its compelling narrative will kindle a desire to spend time in nature, search for seeds and to grow native plants and trees – a hopeful picture of the future for children aged four to ten and their caregivers.

In the resources section at the back of Kowhai and the Giants, Parker encourages children to plant native seeds. She includes a link to Forest & Bird’s Kiwi Conservation Club – Hakuturi Toa website www.kcc.org.nz for inspiring tips.

Kowhai and the Giants is “Like the shadows of memory on a landscape, caught between lightness and darkness, the past and future, a beautifully cast tale of hope and resilience,” says acclaimed artist Shaun Tan.

The unique and intriguing artwork for Kowhai and the Giants was created from hand-cut paper, placed in a plywood box and lit from behind. It was first exhibited in 2016, at the Arataki Visitor Centre, following Parker’s Auckland Council artist’s residency at Anawhata. There was an exhibition of the light boxes in the window of Auckland store Smith and Caughey from 17 to 21 March, as part of the Auckland Arts Festival – Aroha 2021.

ISBN 978-0-4735289-0-4
36pp 270 x 190 mm
Mary Egan Publishing

RRP $30

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Eric Lee-Johnson: Artist with a Camera

Eric Lee-Johnson: Artist with a Camera

John B Turner

Monograph of the Artist’s camera work provides an overview of his career with special attention to his photographs from the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Tritone prints were made directly from the originals held at Te Papa.

Eric Albert Lee-Johnson (1908–1993) was a prominent New Zealand artist and photographer. Lee-Johnson was born in Suva, Fiji and moved to New Zealand in 1912 with his parents. As a child he showed an unusual gift for drawing and he entered Auckland’s Elam School of Art where he remained from 1923-1926. At 18 he joined newspaper publishers Wilson & Horton’s printing department and within a year was in charge of the studio and working a lithograph artist and illustrator. In 1930 he sailed for London, England. He spent eight years in London, from the age of 21 working as designer and typographer with the large advertising agency S.H. Benson. He studied lithography at Camberwell School of Art and Crafts and attended Charles Porter life classes at the Central School of Art and Design in London. His work from 1931-36 was influenced by contemporary German typography, graphics and poster design in Europe In 1938 he accepted a contract from Illott’s Advertising Agency in Wellington and returned to New Zealand. He immediately rejoined the art scene and, in 1939, he was elected a member of the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts serving a term on the Committee of Management, National Art Gallery. His health broke down and after more than two years in Pukeora sanatorium he left the commercial world and with his wife and son went to live the simple life at Piha and become a full-time painter. Lee-Johnson lived in various parts of New Zealand from 1942 to 1960 including Coromandel and the Hokianga, and his non-figurative abstract paintings date from this time. In the 1950s a series of his North New Zealand paintings and topographical drawings recording the architecture of some surviving early wooden buildings, set off a whole romantic movement in New Zealand art. In 1956 he became the first New Zealand painter of his generation to have a monograph published on his work. Public awareness of his painting was further increased in 1956 and 1957, when a short documentary film about his work was seen in public theatres throughout the country. Changes in the landscape, pacific images and the inclusion of found objects such as shells and stones were themes running through his work throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Lee-Johnson is represented in all major collections throughout the country, including the national art collection at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, all public galleries and the Hocken Library and Alexander Turnbull Library. A retrospective exhibition of his paintings and drawings toured New Zealand in 1981-82. In addition to his painting Eric Lee-Johnson was also a freelance photographer who documented the daily life of New Zealanders from the early 1950s through to the 1970s. His photographs were as widely known as his paintings – including images of Opo the Dolphin, and scenes of New Zealand life. Lee-Johnson had intended his photography to form a picture library the use of which would finance his art. The collection of tens of thousands of negatives and the copyright was purchased by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in 1997 – four years after his death.

PhotoForum 64/65: Eric Lee-Johnson – Artist with a Camera. John B. Turner

Published by PhotoForum, 1999

ISBN 0959781854

295 x 235mm, 111 pages, tri-tone illustrations, softcover.

$59.95

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Geophagy

Geophagy
Ruth Watson

Published in association with the exhibition Geophagy, 16 December-15 February 2018, Centre of Contemporary Art Toi Moroki (CoCA), Christchurch. 28 April-27 May 2017, GusFisher Gallery, Auckland.

Foreword by Romy Willing: ‘Cook little pot cook: Ruth Watson and capitalism’s geophagic moil – a letter’ / Allan Smith: ‘Many hands: Ruth Watson’s Unmapping the World’ / Josephine Berry: ‘Layers and entanglements: Four artworks in Geophagy’ / Rebecca Boswell: ‘Whirling and looping: ‘Unmapping memories in Ruth Watson’s Geophagy’ / Bruce E Phillips.

Geophagy, the practice of consuming dirt and clay, can be read as a metaphor for our overpopulation, consumption, and destruction of the Earth. Used by some indigenous peoples in cooking to absorb toxins from indigestible plants, geophagy can also be read as a more positive reference to our relationship to the Earth, and to indigenous knowledge; a conscious and purposeful consumption.

Auckland-based, Canterbury-born Ruth Watson’s multifaceted exhibition is acutely about the present moment, speaking to global politics and environmental issues. Through a sprawling installation, video, audio and printed works, Watson takes a critical look at the world today and seems to suggest that it’s not clear what we should do, collectively or individually. With so many issues and paths of action vying for our attention, the immeasurable size of the problems we face, and the systemic causes out of our control, taking action can feel overwhelming.

Describing the world as being in a state of “dystopian present”, Watson reflects on the complexity of our relationship to the environment, and the incongruity of living in a place that we are destroying, without any clear means to unify and prevent that destruction.

ISBN 9780473442323 Card cover with flap
115 pages : colour illustrations ; 150 x 200 mm
2017

$30 including GST

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Read the review in Pantograph Punch HERE
EyeContact HERE
Listen to Ruth on RNZ HERE