Canterbury Landscape
Anne Noble, Canterbury Landscape, 2024
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.