Siv B. Fjærestad

I am interested in land and landscape as something that holds a multitude of relationships, processes, and often also human intervention; historical, cultural, environmental, social, economic. What happens when we unlearn the knowledge inherent in the landscape, handed down from generation to generation in the form of walking the land, sharing stories of the land? When we move to a different country or place where we don’t know how who to learn from, where to connect with the information, to learn about the places and landscape surrounding us, how will we know how to look after the land then?

For Robert Smithson, a park exists as “a process of ongoing relationships existing in a physical region”.^[13] As I developed Projected Fields, a multitude of layers of information and stories from its past unravelled; I became aware of how the art work could not only be a way to reflect current use and future aspirations, but equally it could serve as a vehicle for people to see themselves in relationship to the land, and to connect with the history and whakapapa of the land.