The Bridge Builder - A Tribute to My Father

As someone who has spent most of my life living away from the country I grew up in, I am interested in the relationship between landscape and memory.

This work is a tribute to my father, a bridge builder. How he worked out how to build a bridge has me bemused. Like something from a Boys Own adventure he took his workers, some of them his younger brothers still in their teens, to remote parts of the South Island, New Zealand, and they set about problem solving, improvising and creating.

I journeyed back to his bridges after his unexpected death to capture these images which I then overlaid with old b&w images taken by Dennis, one of his young workers, during their construction. I feel a resonance with these ghosts as they work against an unchanged landscape.

These bridges are from the first series (of four) which he built at the head of Lake Wakatipu, reachable only by steam boat at the time. They were his life's work and have become part of the heritage of his country.