Reva (September 2014), film still from Common Ground
Mairi Gunn: Common Ground
February 28 - April 9, 2017
AV Gallery
In Common Ground, cinematographer Mairi Gunn reflects upon the lived experiences of New Zealand Māori and Scottish Highlanders, and their unique relationship to the land of their ancestors.
“There are Scots on both sides of my family. My maternal grandfather’s people came to Aotearoa/New Zealand in 1842. Mum’s mother was descended from Alexander Fleming’s people and the Murchies of Arran. My father, George Gunn, was born and is now buried in Methil, Fife. He arrived just prior to WW2.
With only a handful of family stories, no awareness of the authentic culture of our people from the Isle of Arran and Caithness in the Highlands and not a word of Gaelic, I had not even a clue as to how to pronounce my given name.
During the years I worked as a cinematographer, I often worked alongside Māori as actors, directors, writers and technical crew. Then, co-producing and shooting the feature length documentary Restoring the Mauri of Lake Omapere in the rural North, I spent months, in fact years, working in Māori communities. I learned there about what it means to be connected to place and to be bound into a culture that, though severely challenged by colonisation, maintains a strong presence.
When I set out to discover how the umbilical cord of our Scottish forebears was severed from their dùthchas, their inheritance and homeland, I found that the Gunn’s ancestral lands were emptied of people during the Highland Clearances around 1800. I made a wee film with my daughter – Glory Box as a way of working with the sorrow.
I felt duped and bitterly saddened when I realised that the clan societies reflected perfectly the hierarchical setup that had usurped the power of the Gaels in the first place. As a salve for my grief, I was able to visit for the first time the empty straths in Caithness and Sutherland.
But there, I also had the great good fortune to be gifted a copy of Stolen Land – Stolen Lives and to meet its prolific author and aged land reform activist Shirley-Anne Hardy from Pitlochry. Stumbling across her work was a moment of crystalline imperative when I realised that the foundational gift to all is that of the Earth from its Creator to the people and how that was wrested from us.
In 2013, I returned to Caithness and Sutherland where I stayed in the Timespan’s Artist’s Flat in Helmsdale and met with people who had Gunns in their genealogy and a great fondness for where they live. I recorded stories told in the landscape and shot wide pans of the land that surrounds them to treat later with a newly developed PanOptica software that helps to create these ultra-wide panoramic images.
I took the edited Scottish stories up North in NZ into the Māori community where I had been working since our lake doco. Nopera, the carver and volunteer fireman, was deeply moved as he watched Neil’s rabbit story. I recorded three Māori stories with Nopera, Reva and Irihapeti. The three Scottish stories are told by Sandra, George and Neil.
The stories end with a song, according to the Māori custom of supporting orators with a waiata or song as part of their rituals of encounter. I have discovered a new (to me) social practice art form. Relational art.”
Mairi would like to give special thanks to:
Welby Ings – Professor Art & Design Post Graduate AUT University – for supervisory mentorship.
Warren Pringle – Programme Leader Master of Cultural and Creative Practice, School of Art and Design/ Faculty of Design and Creative Technologies, AUT University.
Ella Henry for her input.
And Mike McCree, Dan Mace, Kim Newall, Jon Baxter and Mark Schafer for technical support.
And the people of The Hokianga and Caithness and Sutherland for their forbearance and generosity.