Five years ago, the river beside Jennifer Shay’s Motueka Valley home started sending her messages.
Printed words, sometimes whole sentences, arriving on scraps of paper. The edges were uneven and blackened from a mysterious fire. She found these missives along the river’s edge, tangled in debris or caught amongst plants at the margins.
A bibliophile and lover of words, Jennifer was initially horrified that someone had been burning books. The fragments kept coming, and in the weeks and months that followed, concern gave way to anticipation and wonder. She continued walking her dog on the riverbank several times a day, moving slowly and mindfully, ready for the next invitation from the river rocks.
“It was so surprising and unexpected,” she grins. “It became a thing – I looked forward to it every time and wondered what I’d find.”
She collected the offerings, some as tiny as a thumbnail, and offloaded them from her pockets into a hollow ornament at home. When that began to overflow, she transferred them to a desk drawer. Over the next three years, dozens, then hundreds of them, were collected and stored.
Often, the fragments held portent and poignant messages for Jennifer’s life. Not every time, however. “The first was actually disappointing – it was ‘incest’,” she laughs. The second was ‘sovereign’. “I was like, ‘oh, right. That’s more like it. I’ll take it’.”
Other fragments prompted introspection. ‘Ask,’ one suggested. ‘I will,’ another offered.
Once, while contemplating her mother, her name appeared on a scrap of paper. At another time, she was musing about her father, only to find the words ‘my father’ inscribed on a fragment.
The mystery unravelled during a story-telling event in 2024.
Five years earlier, in 2019, Nelson artist Lee Woodman had undertaken a Nelson Arts Festival residency, using unwanted tomes from the Founders Book Fair to build the footprint of a derelict pioneer’s cottage.
During the process, he decided to follow through with what he calls the “transgressive notion” of setting the sculpture aflame by lighting a fire in the cottage’s hearth. The project’s culmination took place at Tapawera’s Hidden Sculpture Garden in 2020, where the vestiges remained on display.
Well… most of them, anyway. When a flood swept through the property the following year, fragments of literature were carried downstream, eventually landing on the riverbank of Jennifer’s Motueka Valley property. Further floods meant a steady stream of offerings from the fragments’ original source.
Jennifer gave her PechaKucha presentation in 2024 – 20 slides, each with a 20-second discussion – about the river’s gifts. By some twist of fate, Lee was also invited to speak, but a scheduling conflict meant he had to decline. The whole thing might have remained a mystery, but for the fact that Lee’s friend Gabe was in attendance and chatted innocently to Lee afterwards about Jennifer’s strange and wonderful story.
“Gabe wasn’t aware of my sculpture at that point,” Lee says. “My hair stood on end, and I became very curious about where on the Mot river Jen’s story took place.”
He tracked her down via the PechaKucha organiser, and they met at Hidden Sculpture Garden, which is a 45-minute drive from Jennifer’s house.
“I love how much meaning and intrigue Jen’s findings gave her and the people who heard her story,” he says. “Thinking about where the words came from and just how far away they were carried blows my mind. For me it is proof of the interconnectivity of all things.”
Lee’s sculpture was completely washed away in last year’s floods, but the story has one more chapter. Jennifer has tried to recreate the conditions in which she found the fragments in an upcoming exhibition at Motueka’s Zappekin gallery, presenting the words among a collection of nature’s flotsam and debris. After all, art begets art, she reckons.
“It was just so organic and beautiful,” she says. “It was like they were already curated by nature.”
Jennifer’s free exhibition Words will run at Zappekin from Monday, 20 April, to Sunday, 26 April, from 10am to 4pm daily. And yes – Lee says he will be coming to see it.
