ESSAY ON THE WORK.
Essay
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Fourteen. is Phill Prendeville’s first exhibition of personal photographs. Their creation was catalysed by the death of Phill’s father Tony in March 2017. Phill – an experienced documentary film maker familiar with telling others’ stories but not yet his own— picked up a stills camera and used his daily ritual of walking the dog at Karekare on Auckland’s west coast to reflect and respond. While walking, capturing photographs and attempting to reconnect with his father through the spirit of this spectacular coastal landscape, Phill captured two hundred thousand photographs over the course of three years. Fourteen. represents their distillation.
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Following Tony’s death, Phill notes:
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...a period of grief which I couldn’t really articulate or acknowledge even to myself... to be fair, it was, in retrospect, a dark patch...he was my best mate and although through my work and life I had dealt with lots of death and loss, it didn’t equip me to deal with his passing.
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Photography offered a language. Moving through stages of mourning, consciously and unconsciously, he turned his lens to the seas and skies—those seemingly infinite depths—teeming with life both seen and unseen, real and imagined.
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Though Phill’s process was intuitive and therapeutic in part, foregrounding the context of the images’ creation also shapes audiences’ potential interpretations. We are invited to project upon them: contemplating cycles of life and death, photography and memory, and the lingering presence of those who have passed.
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These fourteen large photographs explore the possibilities of abstraction to communicate a sense of something beyond the frame. Their long exposures, brooding fields of colour and choreographed trails of light evoke feelings more than they describe forms—at times sombre and contemplative, at others, restless, bristling, exuberant. They relinquish control over the image, opening a space for something to show up. In this sense, the project can also be linked to colourful histories of ‘spirit photography’.
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The exception to these highly abstracted images are those of Paratahi Island which ground the project in the local site of Karekare – its wild and often treacherous seas, sublime topography and haunting history.
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Beaches are thresholds where land, sea and sky all converge in a state of constant flux. Their liminal qualities have also historically endeared them to film makers, artists, writers and others, as physical sites to explore the unseen and immaterial—portals to other realms, if you like. Reflecting on these ideas, Phill wrote a (fourteen line) poem to accompany the exhibition. An excerpt reads:
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Time does not heal but finds a place that’s new
Life is death’s default and our only clue
To all that is and the keys to carry on
To spaces unseen between the here and gone.
So start again with now a way in sight
Slowly—surely—dark turning back to light.
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In conversation, Phill describes how there is no road map to navigate the death of a loved one, and how grief is often unseen and unheard. While every person’s experience is unique, there is a subtle sense of something shared here which transcends the personal: the potential of something which may be collectively felt. Perhaps it is most prominent in these photographs’ movement, visually and metaphorically, from dark to light. Balancing a coming to terms with loss and a celebration of life, he establishes a personal poetics for contemplating the afterlife—and the possibilities of connecting with it.
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Emil McAvoy, 2020