Oh, close your eyes and you wake up / Face stuck to a vinyl settee / Oh, the line was starting to break up / What was that you were going to say? / 

About

issue 03: body of water

breakfast 2021



Plates Issue 03: Body of Water investigates personal and collective bodies of water, how these bodies of water carry us, how we carry them within us, and how they may connect or else divide.

Plates Issue 03 is available via our stockists. Though we also offer online editions of each contribution (available below), purchase the print edition for the full Plates experience. All sales go directly towards printing costs and contributor fees.


Contents:

  1. Letter from the Editor
  2. Fluid Cusps by Ebere Agwuncha
  3. In Search of Ureia by Ashleigh Taupaki
  4. The Rivers in the Places We Have Lived Together by Mána Taylor Hjörleifsdóttir
  5. An Immemorial by Jonathan Kay and Connah Podmore
  6. The Forbidden Fruit by Gabriel Chalfin-Piney
  7. Lands of My Waters by Jasmin Singh


Contributors:

Ebere Agwuncha is an Igbo designer and maker currently living in Chicago via Nigeria. She earned an Industrial Design degree from Iowa State University in 2019, and has since been working on several interdisciplinary projects in Chicago and abroad. Her current practice and research is focused on utilising historical elements, such as the visual Uli literature from the Igbo people of Nigeria, and preserving them in contemporary iterations through object design. She aims to serve as a catalyst by addressing a personal hybridity and acknowledging divergent practices and traditions throughout the design field.

Gabriel Chalfin-Piney is a multidisciplinary artist and organiser. They are interested in making by way of olfactory, gustatory, and tactile experiments. Writing is a newer part of their practice, with hopes of building an oral-historical-meditative ecology. “Forbidden Fruit” is their first published piece of creative writing. Gabriel holds an MA in Arts Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They are embracing their inability to stop making work about citrus fruit.

Mána Taylor Hjörleifsdóttir is a writer / editor currently living in Chicago. She is a collector of sounds, stories, and visuals, blurring the lines of journalistic research writing and artistic documentation. She is the co-founder of The Documentarian.

Jonathan Kay is a photographic artist and lecturer in photography living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. His practice focuses on blurring the boundaries of art and science to render the unseen and challenge notions of landscape. His methodology employs photographic interventions within the landscape that are site-specific and responsive. Exhibitions include Negative Mass (Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland), WAI—Manga Maha, Awa Kotahi | One River, Many Streams (Aratoi Wairarapa Museum of Art and History), and Nothing but Dust (Wellington Museum). He completed a MFA with distinction at Massey University, Wellington, in 2013.

Connah Podmore is an artist and writer living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Her work regularly deals with memory, specifically the experience of remembering. She has contributed written work to Memory Connection and SADO, and co-authored an article published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly. Exhibitions include This body also holds mine (Te Tuhi, Auckland), I’d rather be both (Blue Oyster Art Project Space, Dunedin), and Light makes soft (30 Upstairs Gallery, Wellington). She completed a MFA with distinction at Massey University, Wellington, in 2013.

Jasmin Singh is a Malaysian-Punjabi writer currently based in Aotearoa. With a background mainly in criminology and academic writing, she has recently started dipping her toes back into creative writing. Her areas of interest are migration, migrant rights, and anti-colonial work, with a focus on solidarity between migrants of colour and indigenous peoples.

Ashleigh Taupaki (Ngāti Hako, Samoan) is an artist and writer based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Her work draws on ideas of oral tradition and Māori concepts of place-making as it pertains to self-identification and ancestral association. Having completed a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, Taupaki hopes to continue creating works that consider the histories of people and place, and enable Māori voices in places where they were once excluded.
︎ ︎ ©Plates 2021
︎ ︎ ©Plates 2021