The House at Night

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

When as an eight-year-old Marie Shannon was required to make a model of her family home for a school project, she instead came up with a rendition of an ‘archetypal 1960s suburban house’.1 The house at night depicts a reworking of this childhood construction — a model of a model, which Shannon has described as a ‘distillation’ of all her constructed works. She comments, ‘I think I must have been overambitious, as it was pretty much an unfinished failure, but I could see clearly what I was trying to do. When it came time to present our models, the teacher pointed mine out as an example of a very bad model of a house, and even flicked the roof with his finger so it fell off … I didn’t connect that episode with The house at night until years after making it.’2

The creative possibilities of failure are never far from Shannon’s practice. The first of her model constructions, Rat in the lounge, 1985 (Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa), restaged an actual event, and featured Shannon wearing a handmade cardboard rat mask as an embarrassingly miscued costume-party disguise. Her photographic texts of the mid-1990s recount engagingly ludicrous ideas for video artworks that she never produced (they would have been ‘a lot of work to make,’ she confides in her Art bloopers, 1994). Like The house at night, many of Shannon’s images reveal heroic ideas rendered with purposefully inadequate means: a ‘museum’ of cat-fur samples, for example, or a map of New Zealand sculpted in potting mix on the carpet.

Shannon describes these small-scale domestic installations as ‘unworthy objects’,3 and her photographs celebrate the intimate and handmade. Her large-format camera and use of available light reveal the textural detail of her subjects — here the wobbly edges of the model house and smudges of glue are evident for the viewer’s inspection. Shannon discovered, somewhat to her surprise, that her better-made models make less interesting photographs: ‘There was nothing that came through in the photograph that wasn’t already there: there was no surprise. The models that were a bit crappy could look great in the photos, because the photograph was the element that made them believable.’4

Lara Strongman 

1 Marie Shannon, email to Lara Strongman, May 2007.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Marie Shannon, cited in Lara Strongman, ‘Marie Shannon’, Contemporary New Zealand photographers, Mountain View Press, Auckland, 2005, p. 24.