Attention Studies is a Physics Room initiative where a group of creative practitioners were selected to participate in a collaborative environment to produce a year’s worth of serial publications. Here is my contribution to No.2. I’ve also linked the whole issue below so you enjoy the variety of skilled writers!
April 2026
Ana Iti’s Ngahere Behind a Pile of Metal installation extends the matter of natural ecologies to include the mechanics of their destruction. The forms of sawblades used in kauri logging are transferred into a pattern of giant white teeth with charcoal borders on the gallery wall. They could be huge cresting waves. Either way, the sounds of each image, the buzzing saw, the thrashing waves, are notably absent. Iti suspends floor to ceiling slings of grease-blackened shipping chains to emphasise the cutting, logging, transport of native wood via waterways and shipping lanes. The row of chains spans the entire space on a diagonal. They mimic marine cranes but at this scale, with those giant watery teeth on the walls behind, the log I imagine running through them is four metres across and impossibly tall. I feel like a tiny tree dweller. The forms evoke a fear for the trees, which are present through implication, or echo, like their sonic siblings. Their ash is spread on the walls to make the jagged blade edges. They have been cut, burnt and are not here.
The signage in the space says the whole room is the installation. The charcoal and the chains on their apparatus of suspension are the only two elements, but the sign is right, I am immersed. In this space the history of kauri deforestation, its relationship to water, and the ongoing risks to climate can all be read in the huge and sparse elements of the work. White walls, a dark stone floor, the chains between and the smeared grey waves are their own collapsed ecology, rich with relationships. Māori ancestral narratives linking kauri to tohorā and the sea, care with/in te taiao, clash with kauri dieback, deforestation and endangered species. Much like the repeated chainlinks, these systems in conflict are tethered to each other in this space. “Behind a pile of metal” was an instruction Iti was given about where to find some kauri trees on her hapū land. The metal and trees are a reflection of ecologies in their expanding meaning as the word spirals out from its traditional ‘natural’ imagery to include intersectional communities. There are no wild places, but there is always adaptation and persistence.
Meg Doughty / Ana Iti, Ngahere Behind a Pile of Metal, Te Puna o Waiwhū, Ōtautahi, March 2026.
meg doughty 