Although conventional wisdom holds that New Lynn is Auckland’s ‘gateway to the west’, I have always found the border to be more appropriately marked by the weird subaquatic sentinels that sprout up from the roundabout on Titirangi Road. Beyond this point, the road narrows, the houses are fewer and further between, and, if your window is rolled down, the smell of the sea gets stronger and stronger.
Scale is of the utmost importance for public sculpture - too small and a work simply doesn’t register, too big and it antagonises. A roundabout - so banal yet so central - is a cracking place to host a work, and the 1993 Waitakere City Council board seems to have agreed. Higgens was a graduating student that year and won the council-sponsored competition with these supersized iterations of her jewelry designs, forms inspired by the lichen that silently inhabits the Waitakere. A testament indeed to the legibility of her forms that they could be so outrageously inflated - first from tiny organisms to jewelry-sized, and then to taller than buildings.
It feels correct to refer to Lisa Higgens’ The Bush Markers so obliquely as ‘the forms in the roundabout’ because anyone, even those who have only passed through the area a handful of times, will recognise them. I do not live in Titirangi but I feel I could draw the three algae stalks recognisably from memory. The community has apparently warmed to them since they were painted - until 2009 they were a somewhat more confronting salmon pink. Originally destined to be removed after five years, they have now inhabited the site for nearly thirty. (And, bizarrely, in 2017 the roundabout was singled out at one of the world’s best by the UK Roundabout Appreciation Society and subsequently featured on its annual calendar, representing December.)
And how perfect a pairing of style and substance that is - lichen, actually comprised of at least two organisms (usually a fungus and an algae), flourishes in town and country equally. It can be spotted clinging to coastal rocks or concrete roof tiles, tree bark or asphalt. They are hardy, weather storms and dry spells admirably and without fuss. In hindsight, a more perfect symbol for this liminal junction, this border between bungalows, bush and beach, can’t be imagined.
Heading into the west woods recently I paused at the crossroad and read Higgens’ work differently. Perhaps the long shadow of Covid-19 restrictions combined with kauri dieback regulations coloured the outing, and I felt that somehow I was being warned away. Like Macbeth’s three witches, their now-anthropomorphised heads bobbed as they riddled, ‘ere the other side we see.