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notes for radiata
Radicant
Hocken Collections Te Uare Taoka o Hākena, University of Otago Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka Publication, 2025








Inland Renderings: Ruminations on Queer Reproduction, Agricultural Archives, and Douglas Wright’s Inland.

Blot: A journal for music, sound, and performance in Aotearoa
Issue 2: Liveness (March 2024).
Ed. Antonia Barnett McIntosh and Samuel Holloway


To look away from, to refuse that which is considered according to a normative socially metric as monstrous, shameful, difficult, is to foster another, ironic form of reproduction—trauma around that very thing. Maybe queerness is a way for reproduction of the so-called-monstrous to be potent, beautiful and animal. “Perhaps the fluttering white moth laid its eggs in me, and my dancing was a kind of hatching,” wonders Douglas.

[...]

Working with archival matter is always a process of selection: what is centred and what is pushed out of the frame; their material and evocative histories, what they preserve and what they cast off to other forms of remembering. What is mustered. Muster: from the Latin mōnstrō & French moustrer—to show/point out/indicate (as in demonstrate). This word has the same etymological root as monster.






escape the weather
No Other Place To Stand: An Anothology of Climate Change Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand

Auckland University Press
July 2022

Ed. Jordan Hamel, Rebecca Hawkes, essa ranapiri & Erik Kennedy


waterbody_2
does it make you feel funny?
min-a-rets, Issue 12

Compound Press
September 2021

Ed. Gregory Kan & Hao Guang Tse (谢皓光)


sea-tree emblem
Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2021 (third equal)
Overland 242
Autumn 2021

Click for full text

‘sea-tree emblem’ probes at a haunted ecosystem of transcultural postcolonial memory (or lack thereof), spinning through a network of entangled violences, madnesses and mythologies.

Judging notes: ‘Works with carefully placed caesurae, considered enjambment and striking imagery, to create a subtle atmosphere of disturbance...The poem evokes unsettling and unresolved absences, which accrue around the eponymous emblem—an unstable sign throughout—becoming itself a kind of ‘ghost-text’, at once concrete and compelling, elusive and haunting.’


making a killing
Second equal in poetry

theatre

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2021
Ed. Tracey Slaughter
Massey University Press, 2021

‘... a fragmented energy... cutting and airy and exposed by empty space.’
– Sophie van Waardenberg, The Friday Review, ANZ Literature.




I will leave you all my body
A fission text for the show Duirvias by Owen Connors and Laura Duffy.

Text & sound design by Frances Duncan
Illustration by Owen Connors
Site by Lin Qian-Ye
Blue Oyster Art Project Space; 2020


Blue Oyster Art Project Space is pleased to present DUIRVIAS, a showing of new works by Laura Duffy and Owen Connors, with writing by Frances Duncan.

DUIRVIAS contains works derived from transmissions received in the presence of two memorials in Tāmaki Makaurau dedicated to those who passed of AIDS-related illnesses: Memorial Tree and The Circle of Friends. DUIRVIAS is accompanied by 'I will leave you all my body' an online text by Frances Duncan.



Still from Hollywood Ave, Selina Ershadi, 2017
Must we also become one with the other in order to speak? In order to escape/liberate the body? How can we be without border? Is this island, our island, a respite from the abyss, or simply a void of a different kind? Must we thrust out, head offshore, into our own wide Sargasso Sea? Or is the blood that flows through our veins just the ink we need?





Land of the Long White Stain; HD/handycam documentary film; written by Claire Duncan; 2015

Land of the Long White Stain
A Love Letter to Music on the Margins

Lumière Industries 2015

Written and Directed by Claire Duncan
Produced by Melinda Jackson
Director of Photography: Joe Hitchcock
Editor: Luke McPake
Series Producer: Tim Wong

‘[This] ‘love-letter to music on the margins’ punctures the romantic view of the touring musician (with withering narration playing over images of rural backwaters) while simultaneously affirming the virtues of self-expression, and the special transience of live performance.’
– NZ on Screen




Billy Apple®, A Requested Subtration, 10 April 1974, 1971–4, silver gelatin print, printed paper with handwritten annotations.


Revisions, re-framings are what make Apple the talent he is, responding with rhizomatic fluidity to point out offenses and issues within the art world and in doing so turning things to his advantage.


I am still here: On Kawara
Year Zero: The death and rebirth of Cavellini
Splitting the Image: Michael Jackson and the next best thing(s) [as Duchienne Smiel]

Le Roy 2: Life and Death 
Ed. Kelvin Soh (DDMMYY, 2015).












Hanging on to the Edge of the World; Claire Duncan; Pantograph Punch 2014; photo by Jenna Todd.

Only a few people have driven off the coast road, I’m told. Drunk. They got pulled out; no worries; soft limbs languid with alcohol across the seat of the wagon.



photo by Lori Watt

Lori lives at the bottom of the world and processes her experiences through an amalgam of obscure, nonsensical metaphors, shitty graphics and confessional daytime TV-informed selfies, developing a slowly burgeoning cult audience in the face of a market who otherwise rejects her. Lori's sincerity is important, because the nature of what she does runs completely counter to conservative production values of 'good' pop music.