Kia Ora Everyone,

Thanks for your support over the year. It is valued.

2022 brought an exciting development due to funding from the UK government. I worked with seven recent graduates to develop their creativity and research skills. We worked by not defining goals or targets but through lateral thinking, having lunches together and defining values. We decided to form an independent transdisciplinary Ecology Centre - The Centre of Ecological Philosophy.

The fundraising aim is £2000 to realise their projects as an exhibition. Your help will raise money to will provide for administration, creative development, release programmes and create a resilient structure as a decentralised organisation

Your support at this stage would be incredible, and we are immensely grateful to all who have bought a print or joined our Patreon programme.

The first releases are three photographs from the Dead Reckoning Series as 29cm x 17cm Prints - £70 unframed (free to our Patreon subscribers) or £105 framed and printed on 310g archival grade paper and mounted. Please click an image to purchase or click here to become Pateron member.

Thank you so much for your contribution and support!

Ngā mihi,

Alan

Colourful, Sky and Water — Dead Reckoning #2

**Fund Raising | Special Open Edition - Single Image Only:**
29cm x 17cm
Archival Grade Paper - 310g Unframed
© Alan McFetridge

Dead Reckoning

Dead Reckoning is a method mariners use to decide a direction when lost at sea. That is, looking back to the last known point to calculate how best to go forwards from an unknown position.

The term has an interesting overlap with Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua: ‘I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past’ a whakataukī or ‘proverb’ speaks to Māori perspectives of time, where the past, the present and the future are viewed as intertwined, and life as a continuous cosmic process. Within this continuous cosmic movement, time has no restrictions – it is both past and present. The past is central to and shapes both present and future identity. From this perspective, the individual carries their past into the future. The strength of carrying one’s past into the future is that ancestors are ever present, existing both within the spiritual realm and in the physical, alongside the living and within the living.

This triptych is part of a series of photographs that explores concepts of Dead Reckoning with Māori perspectives on the challenge of the Climate Crisis. For 6 months, I returned to a cliff to look out and sense this expanse of water, air and human pollution in the Ocean's acidification and Air’s haze. I began to embody this perspective to imagine the past of the place I stood, an entire continent with an ecological philosophy that maintained plants, animals and critical infrastructures such as fresh water and clean air with cool fires for 50,000 years without a history dominated by stories of war or conflict but guided by heavy consequences for breaking laws of nature.

Boondi, now called Bondi, means ‘the noise made by sea waves’. According to the David R Horton map, Boondi most likely originated from the Dharug Language group. Boondi is more than a navigation tool; it tells us what we might expect about this coastal area.