Watch: Four artists talk about their work
Photographers and artists Caroline McQuarrie, Johanna Mechan, Cora-Allen Lafaiki-Twiss, and Natalie Robertson discuss their works showing in Slow Burn | Ahu Tāmau and what the works mean to them.
Watch: Caroline McQuarrie talks about her series ‘No Town’
“I wanted to bring the women and the families in and the domestic life in. I really wanted this project to be about the towns and not about the mines...a lot of the embroidered sampler works brought alive what it must have been like to be in a place where people were working really hard to establish a community.”
– Caroline McQuarrie
Brighton. Goldsborough. Waimea. Waiuta. Caroline McQuarrie’s ‘No Town’ series explores the eerie ruins of once-thriving towns on the West Coast of Te Wai Pounamu South Island.
Her photographs and embroidery samplers are poetic excavations of the communities that formed around gold and coal mining, then vanished when the rush was over.
For McQuarrie, the project is about documenting the sites but also about imagining the lives of the towns’ forgotten inhabitants – especially the women and children often overlooked in official histories.
This series is part of the exhibiton Slow Burn | Ahu Tāmau at Te Papa, 2026
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Opening 28 Feb – Slow Burn: Women and Photography
Slow Burn showcases the diversity of photography by women and non-binary artists in Aotearoa New Zealand from the 1960s to today.
Opening soon
Sat 28 Feb 2026
Exhibition Ngā whakaaturanga
View works by Caroline McQuarrie on Collections Online
Caroline McQuarrie’s ‘No Town’ series explores the eerie ruins of once-thriving towns on the West Coast of Te Wai Pounamu South Island.
View her photographs and embroidery samplers in the collection.