View from eroded cliff face to Palliser Bay, Wairarapa

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

On the cliff tops above Palliser Bay in the southernmost tip of the North Island, photographer Wayne Barrar came across a strange, keyhole-shaped notch in the surface. It was scoured by swiftly flowing water that had no chance to meander left and right to make the more usual V-shaped groove into the landscape. In this it was aided by the nature of the rock — soft, easily washed away conglomerate embedded with old river boulders that reinforced the sides against collapse. But beneath the conglomerate lay a different stratum of soft rock where a new, more conventional process of wall collapse erosion has begun, grafting two distinct formations together.

This intimate juxtaposition of two effects of geological weathering finds a sort of parallel in the disjunction between near and far in the composition. The cut in the cliff is set against a much more distant view of the raised beach terrace of the coast below. You can just make out the physical connection in large clumps of tussock tumbling downhill below the stream exit, but overall it feels as though the far view has been slipped into a paper cutout — or spied through a keyhole. The lack of a clear transition leaves us uncertain about the scale of the foreground. Is this some vast, spectacular chasm? Or a human-scaled formation that the photographer has had to squeeze into?

The coastal scene is similarly left with its own ambiguity of scale. Is that a road or a foot track that traverses it like the line of a diagram, as though measuring the gap of the chasm? Where does the run down from the edge of the cliff flatten out, or is the landscape flat at all? Barrar’s use of the platinum/palladium printing process, with its soft tones and paper texture, obscures this sort of information. Equally, though, the long tonal range of the process allows him to register both the darker, unlit foreground and the bright open space of the beach terrace simultaneously, yielding a form of interior/exterior image that would otherwise be hard to render.

Athol McCredie