Gibson Lemon New Zealand

While in residence in New Zealand, Goodine created still life sets in culturally significant locations to articulate social, political, and environmental themes. She was drawn to New Zealand to document the government’s fledgling social plan for Maori deer farming. In New Zealand as in the US, nature is continuously manipulated for display and consumption. New Zealand's wilderness has become a commodity where the consumers (both farmers and tourists) manipulate or dictate land use. The picture that can be drawn of contemporary agri-culture is one of the extreme contrasts, disturbing in its palpable, vanishing beauty. Goodine’s still lifes resonate in the same manner that 17th-century Dutch still life painting articulated and mirrored the richness of the mercantile and bourgeois society in the midst of change. Her work explores the remaking of the contemporary material world through the metaphor of sustainable farming.