… the good brown Manawatū River moving / sluggishly under the bridge. It’s not the Seine, / but water is water … We live on a floodplain, and the river is ever / in our thoughts and sometimes our houses.
I move past or never and on a typical dead Saturday afternoon in Te Papaioea Palmerston North. “You’re either the wind or the grass” reads the text from the window. The typeface is reminiscent of ubiquitous war memorials in provincial New Zealand, the words resting atop a landscape of yellows, greens and blues dancing in bright gusts of wind, with paint applied in frivolous strokes of energy. In front of the painting, a thicket of dead grass grows from a faded card table like a roadside artefact.
Collins’s work explores the spaces between personal and collective memory, and the environments where these narratives unfold. Or never and summons memories of travelling through country towns; op shop window displays, civic squares and unfurling farmland.
Te Papaioea is often dismissed as a service town, stagnant except for the rumble of trucks hauling meat and milk to the big centres. Once I thought I was just on my way through, but six years later I am still here, with roots growing ever deeper into the cow-pocked soil. The words sit heavy on the canvas, focusing attention not on the landscape or the poetry, but the relationship between them. Either, or, never, and. Moving and planting. or never and resonates with the idea of choosing—or not choosing—a place to live.
The town is full of wind and grass, the river scoring its path between. Life ebbs or flows regardless, shaped by seasons and choices. Maybe it doesn’t matter where you are in the world—water is water.
