Liz Breslin is a writer, editor, performer, and PhD candidate at Otago University.
A white marquee has appeared on the ground floor of the University’s Central Library.
The astro turf grass, white picket fence, and cross stiches hung on the wall – complete with prizes – could leave you feeling as though maybe you’re stepping into a stall at an A&P Show, but you’d be wrong.
The marquee houses ‘Contribution to Field’ the first exhibition of PhD candidate Liz Breslin (she/they).
It features a mixture of collage, cross stitch works and digital printed artworks as well as several zines, and it aims to shed light on the untold stories of rural Te Waipounamu, specifically settler coloniser stories.
“I’m looking at the stories that over and over again don’t get told, while over and over again we’re telling the stories of rural, white, masculine, strong on the land,” Liz says.
There’s a trio of men – Brian Turner (poet), Owen Marshall (writer), and Graham Sydney (painter), who are treated as the Central Otago cannon, meaning other stories don’t get heard, they say.
“There’s this very kind of singular story that excludes women’s stories, it excludes queer stories, and it excludes other kind of men’s stories that don’t fit in with the masculine thing, it excludes effeminate stories.
“There’s a real violence to that, to continuing to erase and ignore stories. Of course, the biggest violence is erasing the stories of mana whenua.”
The ‘Contribution to Field’ marquee at the Central Library
Ōtūrēhua’s Ernest Hayes became well-known in farming circles in the late 1800s for redesigning a wire strainer for fencing. The lesser-known story is how his wife, Hannah, cycled on her own all over Ida Valley and beyond, peddling the device to famers which led to the product’s popularity, and ultimately the family’s wealth.
“She saved that family business.”
In the Hayes family history document at Hayes Engineering and Homestead, this extraordinary part of Hannah’s role in the family history is given one paragraph, Liz says.
“In 1896, in the cities people were like ‘women can’t get on bicycles, this is the end of civilisation as we know it’.
“And yet there she was, cycling around. Where did she sleep? Did she feel safe? What did she eat? What were all the tracks like?”
If one woman was doing this, is it possible there were many more taking on similar challenges that nobody recalls because they weren’t documented, Liz asks.
A lot of Liz’s creative works are ‘cut ups’ – she cuts up lines of text from her own poetry and other publications and pastes them all together on one page.
She enjoys the juxtaposition and the way the “voices jam together” and seeing them hung up on walls for the first time.
Liz took inspiration for one particular piece, ‘Admit Impediments’, from American poet Dodie Bellamy, who is known for her ‘C**t Ups’.
“She gets old, white man stuff and jams it together with her dreams, and just things that the cannon doesn’t consider to be important, she puts them in there.”
Liz has experienced domestic violence while living in a small, rural town.
“There’s lots of ways you can normalise being abused when you’re in that situation, none of which are good. But one of the things that helped me normalise it was the colonisation outside was the same as the colonisation inside.
“I was being told everywhere that my story was unimportant. Some of what I’m doing here, the creative element of my work, is looking at the violence in a more explicit way, because it’s really not an uncommon story.”
She says her cross stich work hung up in the marquee is “really badly done” intentionally, to let people see the “mess of it all” in plain sight and bring some of those stories outwards.
Liz’s “badly done” cross stich is intentional, designed to “unravel established settler colonisation narratives”.
When Liz isn’t working on her PhD through Otago’s English Programme you can find them performing or writing poetry. They have two published collections of poetry and hope to gain a third from their PhD.
Liz completed her undergraduate degree at Sussex University. She moved to Aotearoa New Zealand from the United Kingdom 20 years ago.
‘Contribution to Field’ was exhibited in Wanaka recently and will also travel to Ōtūrēhua and other Central Otago towns. It will be on display in the University’s Central Library until Friday, 26 April.