The Price of Milk - Tororara bottle

Cast bronze - Edition 3/35
130 x 60mm

'The Price of Milk' revisits the familiar glass milk, cream, and quart bottles of home-delivery days, recast in bronze. On closer inspection, the raised lettering normally found on the bottles has been subverted to carry the names—written in te reo Māori—of native plants displaced by the dairy industry: rimu, kahikatea, tororaro, and poheuhue.

The work has its roots in my final-year project at Elam, The Art for Trees Project. In that project I slip-cast 450 ceramic bottles and, for every bottle sold, planted a tree back into the Hauraki Plains. This site is recorded in the journals of Captain James Cook and Joseph Banks, who, during one of their few landings, described in this landscape in terms that advocated its transformation—cutting down the trees and draining the swamps to create ideal pasture. That vision was later enacted across the plains and throughout much of New Zealand.

Today, the Hauraki Plains plantings are thriving, while the ceramic bottles from the project are dispersed far and wide. Recasting the work in bronze has long been an ambition, and this first group of bottles ( including kauri and whau) and marks the beginning of a larger series. Future castings will include further displaced species such as tī kōuka, upoko tangata, kīe kīe, makomako, pūtāputawētā, harakeke, and kōwhai ngutu kākā. 

 - Fiona Garlick