Artist Journal - Land Forms - superimposed photographs - 1983 - © Lloyd Godman

In 1983 I exhibited my first major series of work - a number of black & white photomontage images. While not all these works were montages, for the images that used this technique the bird was a reoccurring motif. While each original image was unique, these prints were copied and then an edition of ten prints made from the negative.

The work was exhibited in his first solo exhibition at the Marshall Seifert Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand.

I had used the montage technique many years before around 1969-70 while working as an apprentice electrician at the Evening Star news paper (this is now titled The Otago Daily Times) in Dunedin New Zealand. I fell into the apprentiship through my farther who felt it would be useful to have a trade. Some of my friends at the time were going to art school and I would watch them through the large windows of the great hall that housed the huge press, as they walked up Stuart St with their trendy threads, and bags spewing with art materials. An interesting aspect to this is that by the 1980s none of them continued to make art - although one was a medical illustrator. Of course at that time newspapers had great darkrooms and it was not long before I was sneaking into to experiment during extended lunch breaks etc. Gary Van der Mark who had been trained at the Royal Dutch Academy of Photography was working at the paper and was very encouraging of my work at the time. It was not until about 2004 that Gary told me he was instructed to "keep me out of the darkrooms" and he argued that the work I was doing was highly creative and should be encouraged. So Gary would allow me in to to work when the head of the photographic department was not around. While he went on to run a highly successful commercial photographic studio where he photographed items for junk mail catalogues, in the conversation we had in 2004 he told me he was admiring of my relentless pursuit of my creative work. He said that for years he would see a feature on my work in the paper about another exhibition and then as he walked to work he would see a junk mail catalogue with his work discarded and blowing down the street.

An image from the poster for the surf movie Javel produced around 1969 produced during my time at the Evening Star newspaper.

It also laid a foundation for the Last Rivers Song work winch followed in 1983- 4

It was ironic that several years later I was involved in photographing the Abbotsford Landslip, and took most of the images published in the newspaper on the event. On the night of August 8, 1979, a major landslide occurred in Abbotsford, resulting in the destruction or relocation of some 70 houses, and requiring the evacuation of over 600 people. No-one was killed. This remains the largest landslip to have occurred in an urban area of New Zealand. Through my good friend Jack Kenyon of the construction department at the Otago Polytechnic I was involved in documenting the unfolding of the event over 2 months. During this time the formation of small cracks in the ground grew larger and larger which caused the gradual destruction of the houses and land as the cracks grew to about 8ft wide and 10 ft deep. Then on the night of August 8th there was a huge movement where the land moved in a dramatic way. While the press were banned from entering the disaster zone, we were allowed to enter the site to document the destruction and I was handed a camera with several rolls of film by a photographer from the news paper - many of these were the images that appeared in the paper and in the special feature on the disaster, unattributed.