Description:

This project is a 3rd-year self-proposed project that most essentially chronicles the journey from Auckland to Waihi and onto Waihi Beach. It is a 140km drive from my house to Waihi -- through Paeroa and the Karangahake gorge -- and then it is another 10km onto Waihi Beach where my family has a beach bach.

My initial proposal was to curate a kind of commonplace book about a journey that was very familiar and personal to me. The content recalls a trip I had made countless times during school holiday breaks with my family when I was younger. I had also just recently been there on a quick trip for the first time since I was in high school.

I started researching the history and culture of Waihi and Waihi Beach. This quickly grew into a seemingly endless mass of text, data and photographs that I could incorporate into my book. For example: "The Rock" at the Waihi Museum, which I 3D scanned using a LiDAR app; I was also interested in finding out about things like the history of street names of Waihi township, in particular in what they index about the history of the township's various early settlers. I initially focussed on the history and culture of the places that I had a strong personal connection to. But as the project developed, it became obvious that there was something uniquely, distinctly Aotearoa/NZ about this journey that I hoped would appeal to and be meaningful for a much wider (Kiwi) audience.

More content: The history of gold mining in the area was of course always going to be a focus, and hence the 3-D cut hole indicating the topographic profile of the Martha Mine that dominates Waihi township; I interviewed my mum for the book, because she has been going down to Waihi and the beach for a long time and has seen them change dramatically; the image sequence pages of Seddon Street shops are a somewhat tongue-in-cheek reference to Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour's book "Learning from Las Vegas".

As I was compiling all of this mix of content, I was interested in exploring different ways of presenting the content in a printed book context: hence, the changes in paper stock, die cutting, multiple image sequences, messing with the page sequencing and sectioning. There are actually two versions of the final book: I initially produced the book in a ring-bound folder, which worked well for the potentially endlessly growing mix of content and the pile of die-cut holes, but it seemed a bit unfinished, so I remade the book as a case-bound tome.