New Zealand
I spent 32 days in New Zealand on the South and North Islands. I took 15,240 photographs which I heavily edited while visually completing photographic stories of my New Zealand research. This includes hiking tracks in magical, lush forests with gnarly moss-covered trees, tussock covered slopes and volcanic outcrops with groves of eucalyptus trees, spherical boulders, spectacular coastal views of long gold and black sand beaches, and intense aqua blue lakes. There are remote, unspoiled wilderness of snow-capped mountain peaks, glaciers, fiords, and rainforests. There are also treetop trail’s metal walkways that tower high above the emerging canopy of temperate lowland rainforest.
This series of photographs is a merging of my artistic and academic skills as a visual arts researcher. It is the artful process of developing a body of photographs depicting that experience. The visual narrative that emerged is similar to grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) used for my academic research. New Zealand told me what photographs needed to be taken and my photographic eye knew when to take the photographs from my years of experience as an artistic photographer. Each of the photographs were printed and framed for exhibition at the Art Gallery of Sudbury.
I create photographic stories by allowing the experience to speak to me. I put together photography exhibitions by collecting large amounts of data (photographs), intensively editing while comparing and contrasting. Each of the photographs tells a visual story. As I continuously edited my photographs for months while making files in folders, I asked myself: What was my experience of New Zealand? How can I represent this experience so that it has the feeling of what each inspiring photograph had when I took the shot? It is a reliving and recreating of experience while working with specialty papers to photographically tell the stories. The 14-limited edition colour archival quality giclée photographic prints are the result of my amazing New Zealand experience.
I worked with my husband Nick Dubecki who is an excellent giclée printer with over 40 years of experience in the printing industry.
Kathy received financial support for her New Zealand research and her publication/exhibition from Laurentian University and from the Art Gallery of Sudbury, Sudbury, Ontario for her exhibition.
See Kathy’s New Zealand video at:
https://artsudbury.org/en/whats-on/exhibitions/kathy-browning-new-zealand-2/
Please see the following URLs for Kathy’s videos and other websites:
https://laurentian.ca/videos-visual-artists-greater-sudbury
