The Winter Garden is an ongoing (2012–) documentary project based in Christchurch following the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes. The work considers Christine McFetridge’s psychological landscape and its connection to belonging, home and post-traumatic growth after this period of transition.
McFetridge immigrated to Melbourne, Australia, from Christchurch in February 2013 and began photographing during short trips home. With distance, her sense of what ‘home’ was became informed by memory and nostalgia. In the same way Barthes sought a likeness of his mother from photographs after her death, The Winter Garden seeks to identify the familiar in a place continually changing.
By examining the space between past and present through McFetridge’s relationships with immediate family, close friends and the natural landscape, the work negotiates the complexity for her in reconciling Christchurch as the place she’d grown up in and an earthquake affected city.
