Artist Statement

Growing up in South Auckland, from a young age I was used to seeing things that many Aucklanders are able to overlook. Some of my friends lived in conditions that weren't ideal — homes that today would be unlikely to pass a healthy homes test. I was lucky, the house I went home to could, at least, be called safe. But I was constantly in and out of those homes, and over time those scenes simply became normal to me — the everyday backdrop of where I was from.

As I got older I began to travel beyond South Auckland, and I found myself struck by homes in wealthier areas — the character they held, so unlike anything I'd grown up around. Rather than pulling me away, that distance did the opposite. It deepened my feeling for where I came from. I slowly came to understand that the house you grow up in is as much a part of who you are as anything else you carry with you.

A house becomes a home, and what happens behind its doors stays private — always, in some way, unknowable from the outside. I try to photograph these places without mystifying them, and without making light of hardship, or reducing it to spectacle. I look as honestly as I can: as someone of this place, not a visitor to it.