Gorse Heart

The Girlies Project (feminist art collective)

Gorse Heartbeat was installed in Civic Square in Wellington, accidentally during the International Sculpture Festival in (2002).

The ceiling-less room was woven from broom and gorse, it was a space built for women, a way of (literally) holding space for survivors.

Shoes were taken off and left outside. Inside, the space was ‘quilted’ in white sheets. The only objects were a comfortable chair, a table (hand covered in gold-leaf) and a stethoscope. Sitting in the space alone, someone can listen to the sound of their own heart beat. The quiet ‘boom’ of survival. The rhythm of surviving. The space was open to the sky, so people lay in there for hours watching clouds move, or darkness fall, listening to their heart beat or ‘witnessing’ that of another person they were there with. The work played with the tension of what makes a space a fortress or a cage, the complexities of ‘protection’ narratives around women, in relation to sexual violence and ‘policing’ literally and metaphorically.

Holding the stethoscope for yourself (un-medicalised) was a performative way to undo power relations, and the somatic poetry of that action was moving.

The gorse and broom were part of an exploration running through multiple works - looking at our legacy of colonial violence in relation to whenua, and as Pākeha, trying to ‘make relationship’ with our own implication in this - to actively work ‘with’ it rather than ‘transcend’ it. In homeopathic and bach traditions, gorse is used to treat trauma. After deforestation by fire, it springs up, and treats the trauma in the earth, building nitrogen back into the soil and protecting the forest saplings. These plants are simultaneously invasive pests and healers. Context is everything.