Canterbury Landscape

March 3 - March 28, 2026



Canterbury Landscape - Installation view 


When Gabe Huria (Ngāi Tūāhuriri) asked Anne Noble to bear witness, to be part of the team working on the Ngāi Tahu freshwater claim heard in the High Court through March 2025, she did a great thing. Noble’s long experience as a photographer helped fashion and focus the extraordinary exhibition Unutai e! Unutai e!  running at Christchurch Art Gallery / Te Puna O Waiwhetu until April 19, 2026. In collaboration with Ngāi Tahu, Noble has documented the degradation of waterways and taken powerful portraits of each claimant standing in their chosen waterbody. It is both a terrific project and a really close, telling collaboration. It is also utterly chastening – a desperate call to action to save and protect the freshwaters of Te Waipounamu.

Canterbury Landscape is a small selection of photographs from Unutai e! Unutai e! They are just a few images allowed in this context a slightly different agency – more artful perhaps, or slightly closer to the practise of Anne Noble as we might know it.



Canterbury Landscape - Installation view



Canterbury Landscape, 2024

 

Canterbury Landscape, the title image is a case in point. It is a large, framed, stand alone photograph, where in Unutai e! Unutai e! it is cropped and one small part of a multi-panel work. The image is a haunting one. A big board offers toxic algae information, risk set at the highest level, red. A pink dawn and dawdling swans offer promise – this will be a sunny day. But the sign is reflected in a large fetid-looking puddle. Its warning of toxic levels of cyanobacteria and didymo is delivered visually twice. So, is this the Canterbury landscape we aspire to? It certainly isn’t the traditional romantic picture of the pastoral sublime. It is Wairewa / Lake Forsyth in 2025 – an entire ecology under threat.



Canterbury Landscape - Installation view


There are two aerial photographs of the rivers Halswell / Huritini and Selwyn / Waikirikiri as they enter Te Waihora. You can almost smell these waters, chemical yellow and green, as they merge into Lake Ellesmere. These areas were mahinga kai, important traditional food gathering sites for hapu of Ngāi Tahu. That kai, the rich protein of flounder, lamprey, whitebait and tuna is also captured in images in this show.

Huritini / Halswell River entering Te Waihora / Lake Ellesmere, 2024 Waikirikiri / Selwyn River entering Te Waihora / Lake Ellesmere, 2024

 


Mahinga kai portraits - Installation view



Canterbury Landscape - Installation view


The tuna photographs are stunning. Punakauariki #1 - #3 are particularly memorable. They are full of movement, soft edges and fluid colour. Imagine a 75 year old long fin tuna in a black bucket. Blue sky, a little green slime and the rich browns of the twisting fish, all caught in a shimmering sheen of reflection. The images are really painterly, capturing a presence that is both weighty and ghostly, that is tuna and taniwha all at once at the same time.

JS.

 

Punakauariki #1, 2024 Punakauariki #3, 2024



Punakauariki #1 & #3 with Mahinga kai portrait, Inanga



Canterbury Landscape - Installation view



Canterbury Landscape - Installation view

 

 

All images in the exhibition belong to the Āhua o Te Wai photographic archive 

commissioned by Ngāi Tahu between 2023 - 2025 
© Ngāi Tahu and Anne Noble




Images of all exhibited works are to be found in the 'Details of works' section at the bottom of the page.

 


Selected works


A Toxic Taxonomy, 2023 - 2025

Mahinga kai portrait, Inanga, 2024

Mahinga kai portrait, Shortfin Tuna, 2024 Mahinga kai portrait, Longfin Tuna, 2024




Punakauariki #2, 2024

 

Installing Canterbury Landscape


Anne Noble preparing for A Toxic Taxonomy to be installed


Anne Noble and Andrew Drummond discuss the works after install is completed

 

 

 

Details of works