‘Tamaki Strata’
A view of the ever changing tidescape on the Tamaki, laid out in muddy, shelly, watery strata.
It is my awa(river).
I have lived my entire life within minutes of it.
It calls me to sit with it, to observe its gentle happenings.
There is no sudden jarring event; it has a continuous and relentless rhythm of its own.
If the mudflats at low tide have a certain bleakness to them, they are broken up by a cavalcade of feeding and resting seabirds: gulls, terns, shags, oyster catchers and herons.
The shallows harbour cockles, oysters, crabs, eels, and flounder.
Life teems forth at the awa, but in a subtle way, revealing its many layers in all the time you can spare it…
Ebb Then Flood 