My husband Hamish Coney and I named this site Maunga Kererū soon after we moved here in 2010. In 2008, I followed my nose to find a new place to be. A for sale sign, almost submerged in long grass, caught my eye as I drove down this peninsula in Mahurangi, north east of Auckland. Once I was standing on the land I knew in my bones this is where I would live. Hamish fell in love with it after walking through the bush and coming across a pūkeko flying awkwardly out of a kānuka tree.
It was a paddock with a bog and some incredible matriarch pūriri and pōhutukawa trees. I was doing my Master of Fine Arts at Elam at the time and Hamish had just founded Art & Object, the art auction house. As research, I began a permaculture-design certificate and it was during this time that I designed the garden’s basic layout, which we’ve followed ever since.
I began testing out biodynamics on the compost piles I’d been making to restore soil on the compacted clay driveway, which became the edible area. The results were amazing and I just kept going. I soon discovered the artists I was increasingly interested in were also interested in Rudolf Steiner, who developed biodynamics. Things quickly began to coalesce as one research enquiry. Now I think of everything – life, art and growing – through the lens of thermodynamic principles: entropy (death-affirming impulse) and syntropy (life-affirming impulse), and the forms that arise between them as life comes into and flows out of being.
My life evolved in a way that made learning how to heal a focus. Once I had attended to my own safety mask, I turned to face the world and what I saw bothered me. After doing a series of paintings called Painting Rubbish – portraits of rubbish on the roads in Delhi – the feeling in me became urgent, and I set out to find a piece of land to practice healing the earth.
Hamish and I oversee different parts of the garden. I look after the edible area and he looks after the native plantings. Now that the studio is complete, Hamish’s plantings have really come into their own.
It is tremendously centring to have the studio and garden in the same space, one influencing the other and informing the work that emerges from within.
The first artist’s studio I ever visited was Claude Monet’s when I was in my early twenties. It made a huge impression on me. His garden in Giverny was created near the completion of WWI and was, in many ways, his attempt of healing in a time of trauma. My garden is a reflection of our time of trauma, one where environmental fluctuations and biodiversity decimation are spiralling out of control.
Life in all its forms are wonder-full. I have dedicated my life to coming to know this as deeply as possible, using my energy to give expression to ever-increasing forms of life. In the garden, this results in more food than we can possibly eat and an abundance of biodiversity.
In the studio, it results in new and surprising discoveries, and in life it occurs as a feeling of purpose, seeing beauty in what’s there and sensing an ever-expanding feeling of peace.
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