‘No Alcohol, No Dogs, No Gang Regalia’ reads the sign as I drive down the muddy dirt road behind the industrial estate in Levin, a rural town just north of Wellington, New Zealand. There is the smell of smoke, burning rubber and burning engines . . . black rain, mud and the clack clack clack of backfiring cars and bursting tyres. Crowds of nonchalant groupies stand in a smoky haze. The bleak winter weather adds to an overwhelming sense of small-town isolation.
– 18 August 2013
These photographs are selected from my engagement with the motorsport events in rural New Zealand, an ongoing project over the past seven years. My interest revolves around the indecipherable environments within the fringes of New Zealand burnout culture and the individual’s engagement with these adrenaline-fuelled settings. The smoky haze that envelops the subjects of my images accentuates the gloomy rural spectacle of these events.
The smell of burning rubber and the veil of smoke allow motorsport to become a setting for experimental and progressive photographic practice. The smoke veil defuses the reality of the high-intensity environment and the drivers’ expressions as they are caught up in the pace and movement. For me as a photographer, motorsport’s disconnection from a recognisable community evokes a sense of otherworldliness.
Part of my photographic practice is centred on the deliberate mark-making of the act itself. The blackened concrete and curvature of the mark-making shows an interplay between accident and intention, producing unplanned figurations and forms on the skid pad. Similarly, burnt rubber falls to charcoal powder on a sketchpad. The random nature of control in the drivers’ mark-making shares similarities with the ideas of automatism within art.
These ‘auto-sketches’ have developed through my encouragement of figurative compositions to emerge from the burned tyre marks, and through my conscious intention to give order to the uncontrolled movements of the drivers. The marks are made deliberately, though the patterns are not. Swooping curves and overworked traction on the concrete are suggestive of expressionistic brushstrokes of late 1950s abstraction.
Auto-sketches are photographed from a high-point perspective, either by an elevated position or by use of a drone, sometimes cropping sections of the skidpad. The noise and heightened adrenaline I encounter at these events are now captured in the chaotic lineations within the composition of my photographs.
