Intersections, Transformation and Trees
Artist Tansy Lee Moir and the poetic film-making of Steve Smart
Dear Friends,
On one of my regular walks, there’s a building site. Construction is at the foundations phase. A neat grid of iron rods crisscrosses what will one day be the floor. As I passed by this week, a worker crouched over the iron grid, he twisted small wires one by one around each cross-point of the intersecting rods.
I continued to walk, taking a seldom-used path through the pines over hushed red needles, and into an overgrown dune track. Spent grass and gangly lupins slid along my coat arms. My dogs kept close, tapping their noses on my calves. We never encounter anyone on this path. Pushing through two overlapping fans of marram grass we emerged onto open sand at the base of the dunes. A woman in a pink coat was wandering there, she appeared to be looking for something.
‘Hi,’ I said.
‘Ah, I’ve been looking for the entrance to that path,’ she said.
We swapped places: her toward the pines, while the dogs and I continued to the beach.
My friend and maker-of-things Nicholena Pine recently showed me a stack of the beautiful willow forms that she had made. I loved the humming symmetry of the finished forms. Yet it was two unfinished baskets which called to me. One had a large gap in the middle. Nicholena liked this form because it became a teacher, ‘I started with willow that was too short. The ends look like the’re lost in the dunes,’ she said. A second basket was held together at the cross-points by small knots of green thread, ‘The willow was too dry and hard. I still wanted it to be something. I cared about it,’ she touched a finger to the green thread, ‘It needed help.’
And before all this making of course, the willow wasted a lot of time: growing.
Trees have been showing us slow rhythms for millennia. Willow is a comparatively fast growing tree. Oak seems more my own pace. Another regular path I follow takes me through a grove of English beeches. The beeches exude a calm welcome as I pass. The air around them is fresh and sweet. A small stream runs below their roots, slipping a merry tone into the trees’ bass notes. The beeches’ bark is moon grey, mostly smooth, in places broken. From their size, and judging by Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial history: I guess the trees to be about one hundred and fifty years old. Relatively young, for beeches. Very young compared to the ancient trees drawn by Edinburgh-based artist Tansy Lee Moir.
My friend, poet and film-maker Steve Smart introduced me to Tansy Lee Moir’s work with a film he made called Transforming. Every time I watch Transforming — I understand on some cellular-response level, that this film is about process; the intersection ideas; the beauty of the human spirit; and trees as beings/companions/teachers/collaborators. I don’t see the many hours this film has taken Steve to make: layering images and sound together to create an overall understanding. Transforming is four minutes of grace. Watching it, I feel the eons channelled into Tansy’s charcoal lines; nature’s rhythms; an attentive diligence; the simple necessity of growth. Mostly though, Transforming moves me because it describes the strange beauty of living. The slow dance, the revolutions within and without ourselves as we make things.
Transforming
In seeing someone dance
a part inside is always there –
keen to the dance
as wings keen to air.
The tree seen, an instant
from a long spiralling sequence,
a gasped pirouette at best
from the run and reach
the daring lifts and shifts
improvised over centuries.
Film wraps time inside time
but on a single piece of paper
it visits eleven ways at once
a bridge to see the stream, see
the steps of dancing giants
who will not rest in all our time.
In drawing hold another gesture,
brush a pulse of broader now –
keen to the tree
as wings keen to air.
~ by Steve Smart
(Poem published here with permission).
Links
Transforming a 4 minute film about Tansy Lee Moir’s work by Steve Smart.
More of Steve Smart’s films here on vimeo.
Steve Smart’s poetry and photography.
here on SubstackEvent coming up
I’m excited to let you know that my first small exhibition (!!) of butterfly art opens at the Marinoto Clinic Cafe in Dunedin on Friday 31st of May. The cafe is at Mercy Hospital, 72 Newington Ave, Maori Hill Dunedin. There’s no opening event or speeches, just art on the wall from 31 May - 30 June 2025. I’m very grateful to poet and friend Ruth Arnison for organising this exhibition, and drawing my art out beyond its shoebox. Here is an example of the work which will be on display.
a delight of quiet crumbs to follow.
I have this ritual when I see you've published a new post, Kirstie. I open it in a tab and wait until I can feel that I am present and open enough to receive what you've written. I don't read it in a rush or skim through it on the go -never. Over the past few days, I kept coming to this tab seeing I could read it yet, and I wasn't ready. This evening I finally was, and I am so glad that I listened to my body, and waited until it said yes.
These words, moved me to tears:
"Every time I watch Transforming — I understand on some cellular-response level, that this film is about process; the intersection ideas; the beauty of the human spirit; and trees as beings/companions/teachers/collaborators. I don’t see the many hours this film has taken Steve to make: layering images and sound together to create an overall understanding."
I am on that edge of transformation that my book project has been asking of me, for years. I feel all the old parts of me I have to let go of, and I let the tears come. I also feel the deep unknown of who I am becoming and so much fear comes... I am slowly learning to breathe through that fear.
Thank you for honouring the slow invisible work of creating. I'm going to return to this on those days when there is more fear than excitement at my desk.