In My Body Is My Vehicle #16, Sage Rossie-Tong uses photography to explore the relationship between body, landscape and impermanence.

Created at Prince of Wales Park in Pōneke Wellington during the construction of a water reservoir, the work documents a temporary terrain formed from excavated earth — a landscape that existed only briefly before disappearing again. Drawn to sites in transition, Rossie-Tong approaches these spaces as places to be inhabited rather than simply observed.

The image is constructed from multiple photographs of the artist’s own body, digitally combined into a single composition. Through this process, the body becomes both subject and instrument: a way of activating the landscape and examining ideas of movement, gender and embodiment.

Rather than treating photography as a static record, Rossie-Tong uses the medium to create an encounter between body and place. The resulting image sits somewhere between performance and documentation, capturing a fleeting relationship between a temporary environment and a body moving through it.

Filmed within Slow Burn: Women in Photography | Ahi Tāmau: Māreikura Whakaahua at Te Papa Tongarewa, this exhibition tour offers insight into Rossie-Tong’s practice and their ongoing interest in transience, transformation and the ways bodies occupy space.