Looking Through a Looking Glass Darkly - Gail Hocking

Looking Through a Looking Glass Darkly by SA artist Gail Hocking  - Finalist in the 2024 Heysen Prize for Landscape.

Born and raised in Aotearoa South Island, I lived close to Ka Roimata Hine Hukatere (Franz Josef Glacier) and have witnessed (within my generation) this great glacier recede at an alarming rate due to climate warming. ‘Looking Through a Looking Glass Darkly’ reflects a personal interior/exterior response of an imperfect vision of the reality of a changing landscape. Disorientation, discomfort, uncertainty, and a symbolic vulnerability are elemental factors in this cinematic vision. The emotive future uncertainty, grief and time embodied by human uncomfortableness are concepts I am exploring in this work. Struggling to orientate oneself in a changing environment and the destabilised disjointed nature and time we are experiencing are investigative trajectories. I ask the questions: As the erosion of a future memory haunts the present so how does one imagine an alternative pathway for our Descendants? To acknowledge and engage in the uncomfortableness of a dissolving world can we then move forward?

Materials: Video
Dimensions: 3min 21sec

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