Home is often imagined as something inherited: language, landscape, customs absorbed without effort. But many of us come to ‘home’ sideways — through choice, necessity, or chance (if we’re lucky) — and we each must learn how to belong without the reassurance of deep roots. Like the hare, we learn to read the ground beneath us carefully. We notice small changes. We remain alert, even when resting. Home and belonging comes slowly.
Across cultures, the hare carries a surprisingly coherent set of ideas
In European, Asian, and Māori cosmologies alike, the hare often sits at the edge of transformation: as watcher, messenger, survivor. So that makes it a perfect companion to my themes of home as recognition, not possession. Identity as something repeated, not fixed and place as something inhabited through attention. In many cultures, the hare has been a messenger, a trickster, a witness. But stripped of folklore and ornament, what remains is a figure that embodies presence without ownership. The hare does not dominate the land it inhabits. It belongs by paying attention.
Hares have long been associated with open farmland and twilight landscapes. In New Zealand they were introduced in the 1800s and are now common in dry grass country (see Department of Conservation information on brown hares).
The hare doesn’t announce itself. It notices. The self remains. The world rearranges. This aligns with ideas of migration, belonging, and continuity. Giving the sense of something small, peripheral and sometimes almost hidden. The viewer learns to look for the hare. This creates a sense of intimacy. It also rewards attention. And more importantly it mirrors how belonging actually works — quietly, not theatrically. Think of the hare as a witness, not a protagonist.
The hare appears as a recurring figure across this body of work: alert, still, and unresolved. As an introduced species, the hare carries the tension of arrival without origin. Present on the land, yet never fully claimed by it. It occupies the open spaces of the plains and river margins, living without shelter, without enclosure.
Rather than symbolizing speed or escape, the hare here is a watcher. Its posture is attentive but restrained, holding the unease of exposure and endurance. It exists in the landscape as a temporary resident, adapting rather than altering, surviving without ownership. It sits, alert and still, balanced between movement and rest. In this way, the hare becomes a fitting presence for the Reflected Ground Project. It is concerned with home, belonging, and identity. Not as fixed answers, but as states we move in and out of.
Across the Reflected Ground body of prints, the hare becomes a quiet witness to change — environmental, cultural, and personal. It reflects a sense of belonging shaped not by permanence or possession, but by attentiveness, memory, and continued presence. In this way, the hare stands in for a lived relationship with place: one defined by vulnerability, persistence, and the act of remaining.
The hare appears before it explains itself
The hare has never been a creature of enclosure. It does not burrow deeply like the rabbit, nor does it claim territory loudly. It lives above ground, exposed to weather and horizon, making its home in attentiveness rather than shelter. To belong, for the hare, is not to possess a place but to know it intimately — the shape of the land, the timing of light, the feel of danger and safety passing through the same space. You can read more about hares here: Hare – Wikipedia
This feels close to the experience of making a home in a new country.
The hare is a creature of thresholds
Dawn and dusk. Field and hedgerow. Stillness and flight. It carries this in its posture. The strong curve of the back, the coiled readiness in the haunches, the eye always open. This liminality mirrors the experience of identity as something lived rather than declared. We are never entirely settled; we are always becoming.
For my Reflected Ground Project, the hare stands not as a logo in the commercial sense. The hare is a companion — a reminder of how to be here. To look carefully. To move lightly. To accept that belonging does not require certainty, only care.
Home, then, is not a finished state. It is a relationship. It is something shaped over time through repeated acts of noticing, making, and staying. Even when staying feels provisional or difficult.
The hare sits at the centre of this tension. It is never fully at rest, yet it remains. It does not confuse movement with escape. It knows where it is. And perhaps that is the quiet work of identity. Learning to remain present in a place long enough for it to recognize you in return.
Brown hare in New Zealand – DOC