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Viewfinder Gallery, Whakatū Nelson. 16 September – 19 October 2019.

Sixteen black and white photographs, glosa. 2019.

In 2003 I went home to my parents' house. This work returns to that visit sixteen years later. Van Gogh's The Potato Eaters is its measure — the low room, the shared table, faces lit from a single source — and the photographs are of a New Zealand landscape, printed with a poem written over them.

The poem is a glosa. The form takes a line from another writer and works toward it: each stanza ends on a borrowed line, here from Lyn Hejinian's My Life. You write your way back to someone else's sentence, again and again, and it means something different each time you arrive. That is also what returning to a house does.

The work was installed in the street window of Viewfinder Gallery, in an unused building with no power. We laid the sixteen prints out on the floor in the dark and hung them by torchlight.