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This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025) on page 331.
This baffing and unstable combination of abstraction and realism, surface and depth was made in the darkroom by laying a tangle of threaded, transparent sequins onto photographic paper while printing a negative of the bush pathway and frog. The fabric creates a photogram of white shadow that appears to sit on another plane entirely from the image of the three-dimensional world. We might try and reconcile the two images into one to create a visual narrative, reading the sequins as a ghostly ectoplasmic presence from another realm made visible in the scene, say. The (magical) frog may be about to spring forward and gulp it down, or it could have burped it out into the world. We can alternatively consider the photogram as activating an otherwise ordinary depiction of the real world. This scene and the others Hipkins photographed for his ‘Sanctuary’ series are all of parks, gardens and similar publicly constructed places of tamed nature. When made strange by the inexplicable superimpositions, they speak of these sites as places from dreams, fairytales and other expressions of the subconscious