The tussock grassland is a landscape unique to Aotearoa - once covering over 30 percent of the mainland about the time of European settlement.
It's been used in numerous paintings by Dunedin-based artist Bruce Hunt, and now in a book of his photography, simply entitled Tussock.
Hunt spends his time tramping into the heart of central Otago and the Mackenzie Basin for his work, capturing its beauty but also the impact humans have had on the landscape.
Although primarily a painter, Hunt's passion for photography developed during the time he spent in Brazil - when he became an object of fascination as the gringo-with-a-camera in a small village in the country's north.
Hunt tells Kathryn Ryan that photography has always been a complementary tool to his painting work but began to develop into a creative medium that stood alongside his painting.
“My then partner required, after many years of living in New Zealand, to go back and reconnect with her roots in 2012. She was Brazilian and had been here and we were very comfortable in New Zealand but we made a very big decision to move back to Brazil and explore opportunities there.
“I think photography developed, for me, as a way to understand the culture, understand her, understand family and understand a very enigmatic and boisterous culture.”
Hunt moved south following university to pursue life as an artist and was always drawn to landscape – the southern landscape in particular.
“It’s a place I have a love/hate relationship with. It’s a place I’d describe best as not being my most comfortable but I’m also very comfortable with it. It’s between those two extremes where you’re very uncomfortable and comfortable that there’s a range of emotions, that tension that goes into the making of my work.
“I think that tension, that uncertainty, that challenge and doubt is really important in any kind of creative medium, especially picture making whether it’s with paint or with photographs.”
He says there’s a certain danger that comes with venturing deep into the land, which he does, such as the cold and the heat.
“But I require a fairly intimate understanding of what it’s like under my feet, so I challenge myself physically and you feel, obviously, very insignificant in these places. As a city guy, as much as the landscape is very important to my work, there’s also that tension of unknown and unease that comes with venturing into it. That is what I’m trying to convey in my photographic and painted work.”
Hiunt says his work is very much focussed on light form, patterns and the rhythms of landscape.
“And all those natural forces that create those elements. I’m wanting to convey those dynamic forms with the frame of a canvass or the frame of photograph. I go to places that interest me from an architectural point of view, there’s a real interest in patterns and rhythms in certain landscapes.”
Having explored these places for the better part of 40 years, Hunt has always been able to observe the changes that human behaviour has caused the landscape.
“You notice those changes, you notice the greening off of the high country landscapes and the expansion of our pastoralism, especially in the Mackenzie Basin… that’s been transformed quite dramatically in recent years.
“I understand both sides of the story and I understand the reasons why all that happens but, from an aesthetic and visual point of view, it’s been really disappointing to observe those changes.”
