ELEANOR
DIAZ RITSON

City Art Depot, Ōtāutahi, Aotearoa: SWAMP SONGS with Nicholas Burry, opening 5:30PM 07.09.2026

08.09-05.10.26

At the eastern fringe of Ōtautahi lies Ihutai, a coastal wetland where the Ōtākaro and Ōpāwaho Rivers meet the sea: its nutrient-rich silts gathering and eroding, its gentle brackish shallows pulsing with the tide. It’s a potent place that defies imposed systems of order, unmaking geometry and contrived form. Ihutai is not simply a place to enter, but one that pulls you inward. Every grazing whētiko, every bottom-dwelling pātiki, every tidebourne branch and forgotten belonging is drawn downwards, mudbound, into the pressing sludge.

This sedimentary biome contains an estuarine force of its own. It collapses contradiction, where decay and vitality coexist, their pungent fusion saturating the air. Some estuary-dwellers bear shells and exoskeletons, while others have acquired slick elongated or flattened forms, all suited to their mudcrawls. Still others wade stilt-legged through the swamp, able to take flight from its squelching grip, the hollowed tracks that lie in their wake becoming a part of this shifting tideland.

For centuries, Ihutai has sustained mahika kai, where the use of natural resources is bound to their care and protection. Yet this vulnerable ecosystem continues to rely on the active protection of those who live alongside it. Recent ecological research found that “none of the monitored sites across Ihutai were categorised as being in a pristine or unimpacted state” (Berthelsen et al. 70), reflecting a landscape in which the marks of industry, both historic and present, are difficult to separate from the estuary itself. Today, Ihutai exists within a tension between the development and commerce that occupy its margins and the growing need to restore and protect it. Amid this tension, the wetland remains a place where occupation, upheaval, and renewal exist alongside one another. From tuna kūwharuwharu, kōtuku ngutupapa, ōiōi and ground wētā to silt, rust, algae and concrete, all are bound together in the same restless swamp.

This collection of work emerged from returning to Ihutai across changing seasons, witnessing the wetland as it continually forms and un-forms. Rather than seeking to resolve the conditions of the estuary, it follows their traces through a landscape so potent it cannot be held in its entirety. Instead this work turns towards the quiet, passing moments: a clay bank slowly giving way, a glistening veil receding with the tide, feathered flocks hunching against the wind.