“After all, there’s an inventory of the body too, as our senses work
together with movement to create a tactile kind of memory”

Jodie Dalgleish

Material Distance (2026), a limited edition book with text by Jodie Dalgleish and artwork by Louise Stevenson, is a beautiful object to hold in the hand. Before entering the physical and cerebral rewards inside, I stop to admire the production, the paper stock, the shifting font colours, the layout, each contributing to this object of beauty. I am reminded of the word ‘review’, of how review is most importantly to see again, and that is what this book of return offers, a productive re-viewing, re-musing, re-absorbing.

“as texts loop into a florilegia, the way a (persistent) grief would”

Jodie Dalgleish

Jodie currently resides in Luxembourg while Louise lives in Tāmaki Makaurau. For three years Jodie and Louise have explored the distance between them through art and text. Two people, separated by distance, use the hue and rhythms of watercolour paints and words to navigate the gap, to cross the bridge, to record and respond to the inbetween, to the here and there.

The book’s opening words place author, artist and reader at the edge of the ocean where water extends far into the distance, igniting and extending the allure of the beyond, as well as revealing vital attachments to the present. This movement into electric foliage, between one and the other, is as much through ideas as through the material touch of ocean wind weather.

Louise’s watercolours effuse a delicacy, a palette smudge that might be lilac blueberry grape. Or then again, the brighter hues, red yellow orange. The text also becomes a visual imprint with its blue font evoking sea, the green leading to medicinal plants, oxide red to a circle of islands. The poetic lines hosting a glorious visual density of word, with senses compounding the tidal ebb of musing.

And then, and then, I am hooked on the notion of wave, a word that may be noun or verb, that may be attract ear or eye, memory or envisioning. And suddenly I have an ear and eye out for the precious ocean at the end of our valley.

“and how the only ‘art’ I can
naturally create is curiosity”

Jodie Dalgleish

The degrees of ambiguity are arresting, yes, I stop entranced in my reading and viewing tracks. I might stall on a watercolour, a painting that sometimes has a square cut out from it. A missing gap that you slip into. A distance lure. A material detail. And then there on the next page, the missing and missed square from an artwork. At times there are the stitchings, the stitched threads, a repeated motif worked in the hand of the visual embroiderer, and then there on the next page, a garment stitched and worn by the writer. I am sideways reminded of a writer’s stitchings and missing shapes.

“as in making a criss-cross of work, from your south to my north”

Jodie Dalgleish

As I read this gift of a book, that satisfies my attachment so beautifully to both art and poetry, I muse upon how the art might stand alone, the writing might stand alone, but how symphonically essentially irrefutably art and writing are moving in tandem, in weave and woven brushing and caressing each other. This book. This gift of braided returns.

Jodie Dalgleish is a writer based in Luxembourg whose poetry and prose has been published in both Europe and Aotearoa New Zealand. She has a particular interest in bodily sensorial experience and how that can be transmitted through poetry and works of art. As a curator she has worked closely with artists to explore how her words might share the impact of their practice. As a critic, her close attention has taken the form of reviews in both journals and online platforms, such as Landfall and Contemporary HUM. Winner of the New York publisher Lazuli Literary Group’s prize for her poem ‘Learning to Walk’ in 2021, Jodie continues to seek ways for the minute and the grand to ‘cohere in a manoeuvring of language’. Jodie’s collaboration with Louise Stevenson is no exception as she follows her love for looking at an artist’s work very closely, from one day to the next.

Louise Stevenson is an artist based inTāmaki Makaurau Auckland whose practice unfolds largely on paper, working across drawing, painting, photography, moving image, and stitched interventions. Her work moves between private storytelling, personal archives, and wider global stories, and has been shaped by formative years in Honiara, Solomon Islands, as well as time living in Budapest and travelling throughout Europe. Attentive to surrounding environments, her practice is grounded in close looking, material sensitivity, and the slow accumulation of lived experience. Her long-term project Someplace Else—a drawing series developed over thirty years across Hungary and Aotearoa—was published as an artist’s book and won a DINZ Best Awards in 2021. From this project emerged a collaboration with Europe-based writer Jodie Dalgleish, where together they explored distance, place, and how meaning travels through sustained, shared attention. Stevenson is currently Director of Te Toi Uku: Crown Lynn & Clay Museum, where storytelling remains central to her work.