Frances Wright
Trout, 2023
“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with…It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”
Trout is a lure—glinting silver and green in the oxygen weed, nymph-like under the skin of the lake. Underpinned by ecological colonial histories and a twisted New Zealand Gothic canon, this experimental moving image work tells a woman-trout story of capture, care, and death at the dinner table.
Bubbling under the work’s surface is a fascinating yet troubling history of colonial ‘acclimatisation societies’, established in the 1860s to introduce species that would ‘enhance the pleasures of a newly adopted homeland' (McDowall 1). Set in an unsettling ‘Pākehā Paradise,’ this dark little fable uses the poetic interplay between image, text, and history to navigate problems of colonialism, anthropocentrism, and the lived experience of womanhood.
McDowall, R. M. “Introduction—the background to acclimatisation”. Gamekeepers for the Nation : the Story of New Zealand’s Acclimatisation Societies, 1861-1990. Canterbury University Press, 1994.
The ultimate wisdom of the image is to say, 'There is the surface. Now think - or rather feel, intuit - what is beyond it…'
—Susan Sontag
