Artwork Information

The dead tree, a motif in New Zealand painting, replicates into the vanishing point. A conservationist and photographer with the New Zealand Forest Service, John Johns' forthright image of a charred pine plantation reflects his political intention to reveal our complex and at times exploitative relationship with the New Zealand landscape. Appalled by the clear felling of native forest on the West Coast, he said that he ‘couldn’t understand how civilised people could commit such a barbaric crime’.