Artists

Kate van der Drift

Biography works Exhibitions

In the Presence of Absence

8/07/2024 to 4/08/2024

Sanderson are pleased to present the exhibition In the Presence of Absence featuring a new body of work by award winning photographer Kate van der Drift.

Soundings

17/01/2023 to 12/02/2023

From the vantage point of dry land, the tributaries of the Piako awa can appear as glassy, opaque bodies of water with minimal signs of movement.

Sweet and Sour

20/04/2021 to 16/05/2021

Kate van der Drift's new exhibition Sweet and Sour is a continuation of the artist’s exploration into the fragile ecology and transformation of the Hauraki Plains.

Directional Listening: Fluvial Field Notes

22/10/2019 to 10/11/2019

Kate van der Drift’s new exhibition Directional Listening: Fluvial Field Notes is a continuation of inquiry into the fragile ecology and transformation of the Hauraki Plains. Hauraki was once New Zealand’s largest wetland complex and has been almost entirely transformed since colonisation by land drainage and Kahikatea logging.

Water Slows as it Rounds The Bend

12/06/2018 to 1/07/2018

Water Slows as it Rounds the Bend is part of an ongoing investigation into the fragile ecology and transformation of the Hauraki Plains. This exhibition is part of the 2018 Auckland Festival of Photography CORE programme.

Sea of Echoes

8/08/2017 to 27/08/2017

Photography has been seen as enabling a realm beyond natural vision, revealing visions previously unavailable to the human eye. Photographer Kate van der Drift similarly pictures what Walter Benjamin referred to as the “optical unconscious” (3). She does not snap to serve the heady aesthetics consumed by so many fans of trendy consumable landscape photography sold by the metre. Rather, these are careful depictions, truly shots of pure horror, of ghosts, of vanishing locations —stunning documents punching a forebodingly eerie warning.

Eventual Efflorescence

7/06/2016 to 26/06/2016

Eventual Efflorescence is a new series that depicts the banal realism of an everyday, suburban environment. These scenes are as recognisable and familiar as any one of the many new subdivisions continually springing up across the developed world. The images are difficult to locate within Aotearoa, or any specific region; not because van der Drift has erased specific cultural signifiers but because they were never there. The street signs point to a global anonymity: Barbados Key, Maldives Way, Seychelles Drive, Mauritius, Bermuda, Malibu, Monaco, Sorrento, Havana ... These names speak nothing of the low-lying and coastal settlement of Papamoa and the history of this vulnerable young town. Its newly formed palm-lined streets are gridded with storm water ditches that lay waiting.

Changing Shores of Shadow

2/06/2015 to 21/06/2015

Imagined and real waterlines dominate Changing Shores of Shadow, as Kate van der Drift contemplates atmospheric fluctuation in close-by, low-lying landscapes, while employing a mixture of analogue and digital manipulation.