Like water by water

Like water by water looks at the landscape of South Canterbury as a site of radical geomorphic transformation. The exhibition brings together a new commission and existing work by Dilohana Lekamge, sculpture and ceramics by Suji Park, and artworks from the Aigantighe Art Gallery collection by Carol Anne Bauer and Fiona Pardington.

Inspired by self-taught geologist John Hardcastle's 19th-century research on the region's formation through water—rivers, glaciers and oceans—the exhibition imagines the landscape as holding overlapping and cyclical histories. Each artist draws from elements of the physical environment: limestone, fossils, pigments and clay, imbued with speculative, relational, ecological and cultural narratives.

Suji Park's sculptures fuse incompatible materials—clay, plastic, LED lighting, and recycled ceramics—evoking archaeological relics and emergent geology. Fiona Pardington's photograph documents a pouākai rock drawing on a limestone cliff face, printed using the 19th-century Fresson process. Carol Anne Bauer's embroideries and paintings render microscopic minerals, fossils and marine organisms in thread and acrylic. Dilohana Lekamge's film installation centers on Ram Setu, a limestone formation between Sri Lanka and India, connecting distant mythologies and geologies to South Canterbury's environmental transformations.