Homewardbounder at Enjoy Gallery
To the uninitiated, the cavernous entrances to the ‘adits’ depicted in Caroline McQuarrie’s Homewardbounder look like hellish pathways into a dark abyss. Actually, after some contemplation and a little contextual reading courtesy of the exhibition catalogue, they are no less so. Adits are horizontal mineshafts. McQuarrie’s series of seven (exhibited at Enjoy Gallery during April) are part of her larger ongoing project, No Town, a series which documents the ruins and remnants of West Coast gold-mining towns of the mid to late nineteenth century. Those works depict a range of former mining town sites (including Waiuta, Big River, Lyell, Zalatown, and the brilliantly named Notown). Some sites still have objects or structures to indicate that a town was once there; some don’t. Many mining towns rose up and faded away in a few years. But there are, of course, more direct and physical traces left on the landscape, as is apparent in Homewardbounder. We could read these works as part of the photographic tradition that explores the cultural legacy of land use and the requirement …