"In my garden there is a wilderness, alive with its own agenda where the plants and creatures compete and are subject to the tensions of climate and my attempts to colonise this environment. Avocado pips carelessly discarded spawn beautifully curved green leaves with a hint of bronze. Oxalis battles with dandelions, and bottles and jars appear as soon as I put my spade into the ground to cultivate new areas and trench though clay to replace decades-old drains.
 
"In this show I’m revisiting twentieth century photographic practice by shooting on a Agfa Clack from the 1950s and exploring how these images might relate to my garden and to images created using digital imaging techniques common in contemporary camera systems.  I’m invested in place and the space that I inhabit in my garden, the environment is constantly evolving as my occupation progresses.  This work is the fourth in a series of works that are loosely connected by the theme of gardening and nature.
 
"Work on this theme began with my project A Dose of Gardening. This was an online response to the first Aotearoa covid lockdown where participants were invited to contribute photography, writing and other artworks to an online exhibition platform. My second work titled A Month of Mondays was part of the Photospace online collaborative response to covid lockdown, A Month of Sundays.  This work was a series of photographs depicting community intervention in a woodland area near my home.
 
"My most recent project Forest Bathing: Beyond the Picturesque reflected an expansion of my practice by documenting a selection of personal and public garden rooms from sites around Aotearoa and was exhibited at the Refinery Artspace in Nelson last summer. This exhibition refocuses on small details through an expanded survey of my own garden in Wellington. This selection of  17 photographic works comprise 7 black and white analogue images from film and 10 colour digital prints."

This is Jake Giles' first solo exhibition at Photospace Gallery. He was in the 2020 group exhibition
A Moment of Quiet the year he graduated from Massey University's photography degree programme.
Pilgrimage is a tight selection from many images taken during Jake's recent and extensive walking trip - the length of Te Wai Pounamu and beyond. His exhibition opens on Friday 12th May, 5pm-7pm, and shows in gallery room 3 until 2pm on Saturday 3rd June.
There will be an exhibition of paintings by Hana Carpenter - 'Borderland' - in gallery room 1. This is  a Gilberd Marriott Gallery exhibition, opening the same evening and running the same dates.

'Piecemeal' is the artist's exploration of their experience of trauma and trauma therapy. It is a visual and personal representation of how trauma has affected their sense of self, how it has fragmented and fractured all aspects of the self and bled into all facets of their life. But it also about how recovery from trauma is making sense of ourselves; it is taking the slow process of looking at individual parts of ourselves, our childhoods, our intergenerational trauma, and reforming ourselves back into something whole again, something functional, although never final. The pieces we pick up and rearrange may resemble our old selves, and they often fit together in familiar, sometimes disturbing and unexpected ways.  

The artist has shot the series on Polaroid I-Type film, then lifted the emulsions, rearranging and layering them onto watercolour paper.

'Piecemeal' runs from 5pm on Friday 14 April (opening) to Saturday 6th May, 2023, at Photospace Gallery, 1st floor 37 Courtenay Place, Wellington.
Normal gallery hours are 10am-3pm Monday-Friday, 11am-2pm Saturday, closed Sundays and public holidays. Admission is free, artworks are for sale.

Tracey Kearns has shown at Photospace Gallery previously in 2011, 2012 and 2014.