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Fifteen years ago, during a visit to the South Island from my (at that time) home in Auckland, I purchased a T shirt in Omarama which has ultimately lead to this exhibition.  The phrase on that T shirt ‘The earth has music for those who listen’ resonated and has become increasingly important to me.
 
Recently I have had the opportunity to slow down and notice small things; to watch the light through leaves, to hear the wind in trees, to listen to birds sing and also, to contemplate the decline of native species – worldwide and in Aotearoa.
 
Using early photographic methods, which are in themselves slow, I have harnessed the sunshine in our garden to create works which I hope remind us to consider the taonga of Aotearoa – and of life itself.
 
The Earth has music for those who listen. 

I am a fourth generation photographer.  Both my great grandfathers were active with photography in the late 1800’s. My grandfather, Henry Hope-Cross, was well known in the Wairarapa as a photographer and my father, David, after studying photographic engineering in Cologne, Germany, worked for an international photography company for many years. 

It is probably not surprising then that I spent many hours in a darkroom at home whilst growing up in Auckland.  
After secondary school, I completed a Diploma in Photographic Arts and worked for a time in commercial photographic studios. 
During his business travels overseas, Dad had collected and given me a couple of brochures, which I rediscovered after my move to Alex.  These were about the very origins of photography, which piqued my interest and led me, in 2011, to attending two workshops at Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, the home of England’s first photographer, William Henry Fox Talbot. 
Learning the Photographic Drawing process (invented in 1835) was to change the direction of my photographic practice; the workshop was an absolute ‘lightbulb moment’.  I fell in love with the tactile, hands-on simplicity of this process and others like it, and realised this was how I wanted to spend my days.
I was very fortunate to return to Lacock in 2013, spending time as artist in residence, building the second largest body of Photographic Drawings in the world – the largest collection belonging to Fox Talbot himself.
Annemarie's 'Still' series of  9 images have recently been purchased by Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand.

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