Hoping to Tie a Sapling

Nat Tozer’s A Sapling to Tie (2025) draws us into the magic of an Aotearoa childhood. The lush bush of Opua, Ipiripi Bay of Islands, where Tozer grew up, is the setting of this new work. Activated by the performance and play of the artist’s two children, this landscape becomes a site full of potential, of temporal dissonance between past and future. Emerging from the concrete wall of Masons Lane, its rich green becomes a portal between inner-city Te Whanganui-a-Tara and Opua’s shining bush.

The way Tozer approaches the land is thoughtful. Her children run through its green and brown in bare feet. We see their forms cutting away down gravel paths, pushing through ferns and undergrowth, and climbing the bent branches of trees. The path they make is not a direct track through the bush, but a scattering of moments: of stopping and trying things out, taking a new direction, changing speed, finding an object of interest; a large slab of corrugated iron becomes a shipwreck or a new home, and a long blue plastic rope, a lasso, tail, or snake. But these materials and moments of play and experimentation do not eventuate into anything concrete, a hut or structure or some new configuration. Instead, they remain in a place of pure potential. The slow motion of the video extends the children’s running legs into thick, intentional steps, which are exaggerated by a low, resonant soundtrack. This treatment of time is perhaps a play on the cinematic quality of discovery footage, like that of the first man on the moon—atemporal and syrupy with meaning. These images, exposing into and over each other, appear as a process of memory-making; some scenes are looped as the work appears to extend into an infinite adventure, the bush massive and the daylight endlessly hot and bright.

Yet about half-way through the work, this sunlit reality is cut by the cool of crystalline water. Seemingly extruded behind the camera, a sheet of digitally-animated water turns from suspended splash into a viscous orb, hovering mid-air over the scene. This orb has the pristine clarity of an advertisement, like the big drop of water that runs down the side of a cold drink can. It is a seductive image, one of freshness, and clean, mirror-like reflections. This dense orb follows the children like a futuristic companion; liquid, playful, loyal. The water acts as an intermediary between us as viewers and the intimacy of watching, of following someone at play. Are we seeing these actions as they happen, or returning to the artist’s memories, seen through this wet prism of sentient water? Floating, following, and reacting with ripples, this water is both animate and lively. In this way, we are made aware of the presence of the non-human agents that are always at play in any environment: water, trees, stones, particles in the air, spores, dirt. We might ask, what are they observing? What is our relationship to them? Are our experiences and memories shared?

Speaking with Tozer, we entered this water orb together, emerging into her childhood as she described tying saplings in the same bush depicted in A Sapling to Tie. Returning to this area with her children, these exact saplings, now humped, curved trees, were hard to locate, confused by the presence of other saplings tied by other children, a project of quiet and unknown collaboration years before. This slippage in time and memory is important to how Tozer negotiates the Opua bush for and through her children in this work, as somewhere specific and meaningful to her, but seen anew through the eyes of the next generation.

Known to bury canvases in the earth, to treat a concrete pavement like an archaeological site, to imagine electric, massive geologies, the aboveground nature of A Sapling to Tie zooms out from Tozer’s often-micro approaches. But it is still about earthly materials as vibrant, lively matter entangled in fierce, underground networks—trees that have existed for hundreds of years, the dirt and rock for millions. Her interest in deep, geological time now encompasses genealogical time, intimate time, the time over a summer, or a day, or the 10-minute duration of the video.

To reach Tozer’s cutting of wobbly, nostalgic lines across the whenua required me to cut predictable, vertical lines across central Te Whanganui-a-Tara to the end of Lambton Quay. This contrast made me feel homesick; it reminded me of the massiveness of possibility felt running through the bush as a child, one of the only times you might be fully alone. In this freedom, all things gain potential: materials to build huts, things to organise by colour and finish and size, bits of plastic or metal to search for, to make into treasures.

This is a kind of freedom that I have started to look for again. Some people I know can still do it. Can make magic

by cutting harakeke with their nail and braiding it into a long plait or

by blowing on a blade of grass through their thumbs like a dull whistle or

by slipping an aluminium ring-pull on their finger, a readymade marriage.

What Tozer offers us, what this work offered me, is a return to this shared fizz of potential. A Sapling to Tie is a reminder that though how we interact with the world changes, it does not necessarily have to lose its sense of possibility.

Rosa Cachemaille is a writer and post-graduate student based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She has a particular interest in exploring new materialisms, concepts of reenchantment, and the deep connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics in art practices.