The same but different: mountains, Barbara Tuck and longing
Here in Wanaka, I can see mountains everywhere I look. To my left is a tree speckled rockface, Mounts Maude and Burke rise jagged in the distance straight ahead and Lindis Peak erupts East. I’d come chasing mountains, and here they were in glorious surround sound.
Yet this landscape feels familiar and foreign to me all at once. Sionedd – the real mountain lover amongst us – has felt a similar strangeness to the beauty here, hiking and biking but not yet feeling that buzz of summitting, or giddy goodness when you look out on a spectacular view (of which there are many). Perhaps it is the sheer number of mountains here, perhaps it’s the way life has assembled around us so quickly, routine measuring out parcels of “adventure time” between work and sleep. Perhaps we hadn’t realised quite how lucky we’ve been to live so close to Snowdonia and have access to the mountainous countryside of our own home.
Barbara Tuck’s exhibition ‘Delirium Crossing’ was showing at Christchurch Art Gallery when we visited the city last weekend. It was a relentlessly hot day and we floated in a glorious post-heat calm into the cool of the gallery. ‘Ō Tū Wharekai’ stands out of the wall, all autumnal reds and reflected lakes crested by a blanket white sky. I know this landscape, I think, or at least the mountain range that stretches just below the clouds – the way the mountains erupt from the lowlands at home, ever changing but comforting constants in the landscape.
Yet, of course, I do not know this place, nor the patchwork of countries Tuck draws from in her landscape-tapestries. This is the fascinating way she paints: in drawing every angle, every visible viewpoint of a landscape, she taps into the way places are composed of fractions of memory, experiences and feelings, ecologies and climates, ever shifting and re-forming. For Tuck, the flaws of remembered visions are superimposed onto one another. Looking at her work, you can hear waterfalls crashing down the hillside, feel the burn of the sun in a desert landscape, refreshed by the lake next-door. We exist in, and contain memories of mountainous multitudes, micro-climates and ecologies - we carry these fragments of remembrance with us.
How do these “wordless lands” speak to us, Tuck asks. How do our landscapes present to us? How do we connect to the “wild” places around us?
Barbara Tuck, ‘Ō Tū Wharekai’, Oil on Board, 2010
The Welsh word “hiraeth” is a famously untranslatable one, describing a nostalgic longing for another place: "hir", meaning long, and "aeth" meaning sorrow or grief. It is a particular brand of homesickness, not overwhelming, nor particularly sad, but a whisper across the seas from a home far away. The familiarity I feel amongst the mountains here is informed by the comfort I felt in the mountains of home, but they are distanced from me by their unfamiliarity – they demand to be explored and understood.
One of Sionedd’s colleagues said that she never connected to the mountains of Queenstown, but as soon as she came to Wanaka it felt right. Who knows when, or how, if, or through what medium Sionedd and I will find connection with this landscape – all remains to be discovered.
Slowly, surely falling in love with Wanaka - here we visited Rob Roy’s Glacier <3
