Courtesy: the artist and Jhana Millers Gallery, Wellington.

Jhana Millers Gallery commences their year with a solo exhibition of woven works by Carline McQuarrie, How deep into the earth we sink. This exhibition is a response to the time spent at The Gullies Arts Residency in Rangitīkei over winter 2023.

A selection of poems from Ish Doney accompany the exhibition.

The land

It is always also about the land.
Of course it is.
Everything comes from there.

It’s there in the piece work of fields,
viewed from the sky.

But even if the weave had been
another pattern entirely,
it would have been there in the wool.
Spun from the long white fleece of sheep
carefully husbanded for hundreds of years.
Sheep bred again for this land.

And even if the yarn had been cotton,
the sheep would be there in the pattern,
in that division of fences.

Before the land was a thing
that could be owned and
fences were used to stake that claim,
they guarded livestock
from predators or wandering.

There’s a trick of pretending
that we’re not also nature.
Separating self from the dense weave
of ecosystems. But we live here too.
We’re also about the land.

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