Iain Cheesman

“The River is”

Ashburton Art Gallery Foyer Wall project

October 2023 - March 2024.

‘The River is”

I have memory of watching a friend of my grandmothers search for water underground, it was in the back paddock from where we lived, i must have been 5 or so and believed in everything. 

The paddock was at the terminus of a dead end Road in Loburn, if you get out of your car and keep walking through the patchy gorse and broom there before you is Rakahuri….the Ashley River.

My grandmothers friend used a wooden divining stick (Y) and in his palm was a $5.00 note.

I think he twitched the stick a bit fraudulently, but he fooled me and i saw water bubbling up from below…. imagination is the great irrigator of life.

Today, water is the new oil or the new gold, it will become more so as time flows forward.  

Where we live in Waiuku we catch most of the water we use, it runs off the many roof structures we have, there nothing divine in this, it is just the act of interception. We catch it and feel like we own it, but then it always flows through our fingers and is gone.

Iain Cheesman

2023

Rakahuri

my river is a snake

taking advantage of gravity

and all it wants 

is to see the sea

it takes its measure of silt

pebble, stone and the sandy loam

yes it plays its part in the greater entropy 

as it widens itself near the sea the sea

it will burst its banks in flood

not ‘Thee Flood’ but smaller ones

after we bulldozed and built

and took away some of the estuary 

my river is a snake 

just wanting to flow free

for all its length from mountain to sea

one day it will,  just you see

and it will feel like an eternity.

Iain Cheesman, 2023.