Palimpsest | Landscapes

Palimpsest is a reinvention. The scarcity of parchment, a writing surface made from animal skin, led to its reuse during the Middle Ages through the careful scraping away of layers of ink to make way for new text. The re-used document was a palimpsest – a text with the ghost of its previous use faintly visible behind the new script. Vincent Ward’s Palimpsest/ Landscapes takes this notion of reinvention and applies it to the body, environment, language and art.

Palimpsest/Landscapes grew from my interest in painting, film, landscapes and personal histories . I apply ink, paint and pigments directly to the skin like a canvas, then breathe on it the elements, of wind, dust, rain and fog. It could be painting with light, or filming with paint, either way it’s on a new landscape; our bodies. Ephemeral as the elemental world we live in, and as harsh and varied as the hill country I experienced as a child. 

Layered histories 

I grew up in the Wairarapa. My father Pat, having farmed in the province for three generations, knew all the stories from his father and grandfather. They were almost always stories about the dead, or an exodus of one form or another. 

Evoking a powerful sense of place that spoke in voices of those who had gone before. 

When my father drained ‘the swamp,’ he found a perfect, large, Maori adze. He rolled the miracle of it around in his war-damaged hands, and assumed that the warrior and kumara planter who had abandoned it must have had large rough hands like himself. Why would he have abandoned something so precious? It was a remnant of stories retold by local kaumatua of their hapu fleeing from invading warriors. 

There were other wars and other soldiers that came in waves and left. At nearby Tauherenikau there was a training camp for young men preparing to depart for World War I, many of whom would never return to this place. A place where my father would later plant trees from every nation that had participated in the war and erect a stone plinth. A generation later, Japanese prisoners of war were interned there during World War II. One Christmas, in an attempted escape from the prisoner of war camp, 48 were mown down by machine gun. My Father invited one of the surviving Japanese officers to donate a tree. Alongside the tree, he sent a plinth with a Shinto poem ‘Behold the summer grass all that belongs of the dreams of warriors.’ When you drive past the site on a hot Wairarapa day you can almost hear their whispers in the burnished fields. 

In the work I reimagine the human body as deserts, mountains, caverns and river beds with breath and water both giving them life. Through filmic isolation these primordial bodies, I strive to create a new landscape where we see the forces that shape humans and the land as if they are one. 

The body remembers. 

My father had had three quarters of his body burnt during World War II. Years of skin grafts followed. 

My mother, a Jewish refugee, had fled Germany. She was much younger than my father. They met on the edge of the Sahara during the war. To Pat it must have been as if she had risen out of the desert sand - the place where he had been burnt - her perfect form, reflecting in miniature the desert contours, its smoothness magnified and contrasted as he looked down at his own abraded body. 

He was drawn to the youth and spirit of the woman and took her back to NZ where they started to farm on a ragged unbroken piece of hill country with crumbling cliffs where trees and clay would wash down into the river. Pat saw the land like his own body - broken and needing repair, and what he wanted from it was an echo of the beauty he found in the perfect form of his wife. 

In Palimpsest / Landscapes ink consumes water and marks the body, just as we scar and layer the land with human history and memory. 

The seemingly endless flesh grafts to my Dad’s body, from one part to another, contrasted with the perfectly straight fence-lines that he dug and wired on apparently impossible hill and cliff-edge terrain. The lines created, for a 6me, order and form - a boundary, delineating a sanctuary for my mother and for us, against the entropy they had both experienced during the war.