Stipes, Blades and Bladders
Words and photos by Anne Basquin.
An exposed kelp bed, Te Kohuroa Matheson Bay.
A kelp bed sits exposed at low tide near the island at Te Kohuroa, its holdfasts, stipes, blades and bladders glint mustard-yellow in the evening sun. The falling tide pulls all the way out, turns, pours languidly back over the kelp’s yielding tendrils.
I captured this photograph in the winter of 2024. The following spring, the Te Kohuroa Rewilding Initiative hired me as their assistant project coordinator to help deliver their summer pilot kelp reforestation programme.
I first came to know the island’s significant diversity when I learned to freedive there in 2021. I spent hours combing the weed-line and practicing breath-holds, sharing the water with snapper, crayfish, blue maomao, octopus, porcupine fish, kingfish, eagle rays, stingrays, blue cod, john dory, bronze whalers and even a mako shark.
Being witness to the project’s first summer was a unique privilege. The hours I spent volunteering underwater were the most enriching, as they returned me to the training ground I loved, and reinstilled a greater sense of belonging to this ecosystem and community.
Te Kohuroa Rewilding Initiative takes an ecosystem-based approach to conservation. I aim to do the same in my art and writing practice by situating the work and the body of its maker within the wider ecological context at the moment of making. How I arrive at the moment is always pressing on the narrative of the work. My body and the space are each in flux, each in conversation.
“ The hours I spent volunteering underwater were the most enriching, as they returned me to the training ground I loved, and reinstilled a greater sense of belonging to this ecosystem and community. ”
photo: Benthics.
The sea and my body are greatly linked.
When the photography collective Women’s Work put out a call for submissions with the theme of (In)visible, I returned to the photographs of the exposed bed of kelp soaked in evening light. When I took this photograph, my body had not long undergone duress and loss, and the tide’s unending flowing in and ebbing out was soothing. The golden tones of the evening had lent the photograph a hopeful mood—and perhaps my body too—that matched the hope I felt as I dove down to the seafloor to gather kina. The sea and my body are greatly linked and after those losses I entered a covenant of caretaking with my body, at the same time I as I entered a covenant of caretaking with Te Kohuroa’s budding kelp. As I worked underwater, the concept behind the images I’d shot that winter began to coalesce. I chose the most impactful images, refined the concept and made my submission.
My work was included in the Women’s Work Exhibition in Tāmaki Makaurau in March, giving me the opportunity to promote and celebrate the leading-edge conservation work that TKRI and the Te Kohuroa community are doing.
Anne’s Artist Statement
This photograph was taken opposite the island at Te Kohuroa Matheson Bay, currently the site of community-led conservation run by the Te Kohuroa Rewilding Initiative, who are working towards kelp reforestation by removing an overabundance of kina.
Working within their female-led team, I can’t help but draw parallels between conservation and caretaking. Much of our labour, underwater or behind the scenes, is invisible, just as a clean home obscures the hours of work that go into keeping it that way. Arrowing down towards the seafloor to gather an armload of kina, I wonder how this work will be quantified at the surface.
This photograph peers through the ocean’s mirrored edge, to frame this ever-changing space at the intersection of observation and ecological dynamism, of women’s work and the caretaking of our ecosystems. This photograph aims to make our labours of caretaking visible.
About the Author
Anne Marie Basquin is a writer, photographer, and artist based in Leigh near Goat Island / Te Hāwere-a-Maki in Aotearoa. She grew up in the Midwest and Great Lakes region of the US and Otepoti in the South Island. She is currently at work on a book of essays on girlhood, dislocation, miscarriage, and healing trauma with saltwater. View more of Anne's work here: https://annemariebasquin.com/
