During the Tylee Cottage residency, Culy says portraiture will form a large part of the project he develops. He uses a 4x5in large format view camera and requests permission from the people he is drawn to photograph in situ.
Recent examples are children wearing Iron Maiden T-shirts, a girl in Trafalgar Square with magenta hair and eyebrows, local artists and a young woman writing in her diary beside the river. An eerie mist shrouding suburbia, a skeleton in a church, a golden mask on a grave and Humpty Dumpty winking in Kowhai Park have also drawn Culy’s camera lens.
“I’m very open, photographing anything that catches my attention. And often for me, it’s like the ideas come from the work itself. It’s an iterative process of me exploring, trying to find those magical moments in everyday life, bringing the pictures back, looking at them and then something emerges out of that.”
Culy has been working in black and white for the past five years or so, when, he thinks, he was perhaps less optimistic about the world. But since his and his partner’s baby arrived (they are with him at Tylee Cottage), he says he has been feeling more positive about the world.
“I’ve switched to working in colour, not just for that, but also because after spending time here, colour felt right for this project and this place. I’m very much working in a similar way, but switching from monochrome to colour makes you look at the world completely differently. It’s given me an opportunity to experiment a bit more.”
Culy says he grew up as a skateboarder, knowing nothing about art until his late teens, although his friends were graffiti artists, photographers and film-makers. A growing interest in creativity was piqued while living in London.
“I was taking pictures a little bit here and there and I remember seeing some Diane Arbus pictures and [thought] photography can really do something more than just record things. It can tap into your psychology and be an art form on its own terms.”
Back in New Zealand, Culy studied photography at Massey University, where he gained a Master of Fine Arts. His work was recognised with the Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi Laureate award in 2021 and the Marti Friedlander Photographic Award.
Culy is very aware that his residency at Tylee Cottage follows in the footsteps of “photographic heroes” such as Laurence Aberhart, who was the first artist in residence in 1986, when Culy was born; Anne Noble; Ans Westra; Andrew Ross; and friends Conor Clarke, Solomon Mortimer and Zahra Killeen-Chance.
“It’s been one of those residencies that is a bit of a dream residency.
“I love Whanganui. The people I’ve met here have been so friendly and welcoming and generous and then there’s something about the openness, being able to see the horizon; the slower pace of life and to have the time to just focus on making work for four months is probably a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”