Tess Walker Elliott
Prelude
22 October – 29 November 2025
Prelude documents imagined projections of a settler woman’s life informed by the site and archives of Ewelme cottage in Pānera (Parnell) and the short stories of Katherine Mansfield.
In Mansfield’s Prelude, the mother, Linda, is frightened by the objects and furnishings around her ‘THEY were not deceived. THEY knew how frightened she was; THEY saw how she turned her head away as she passed the mirror.’
Haunted by the coming alive of these colonial objects, Linda sensed that ‘THEY wanted something from her and she knew that if she gave herself up and was quiet, more than quiet, silent, motionless, something would really happen’. These uprooted objects are not only a reminder of her own separation from and consequent longing for her homeland but represent the illusory belief in New Zealand as a new utopian home and her role within it – ‘watching for something to happen that just did not happen’.
Aware of this inbetweenness, the objects’ haunting reflects Linda’s own unsettled disillusionment. Her motionlessness and her silence emblematic of the general settler women’s complicity in the colonial project.
These photographs taken at Ewelme are concerned with the ‘home-maker’ who is both non-self-governing and culpable, who dutifully fills a land which has been surveyed, carved and hollowed with homes, objects and children. Prelude is an attempt at a kind of anamnesis – a recollection of a supposed previous existence – in the search for descent.
With thanks to Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga.
Images by Anton Maurer