Toni Lochead

This video performance explores ideas of urbanisation, land rights, waste, and deforesting, specifically in the overconsumption of wood and the legislative battles around the right to own the foreshore of NZ beaches.

My work is centered around the site of my neighbourhood, in Te Atatu Peninsula, specifically on the local beaches there which allows for a closer connection to my own community and makes a good starting place for the discussion of these issues. Because of this, the found wood I collect in this piece is all found along the Te Atatu shoreline and is then repurposed into a potentially usable object, speaking to sustainability, and recycling and encouraging other potential solutions to the issue of these unwanted items. The work also takes a more critical role through challenging the foreshore legislation by building a structure that speaks of owning and dictating what happens on the land it is built on, when building on a public beach.

This work aims to simply bring forward these topics into discussion and to provoke questioning and thoughts around the viewer's own role in these problems.