I have had a crush on the Vitrine at the Waikato Museum since I first started making artist's books, which are so awkward to exhibit in conventional gallery settings. That beautiful big glass cabinet, in its prominent foyer location just looked to me like the perfect place to show my books. So about a year ago I was delighted to be invited to submit a proposal for a Vitrine Exhibition.
I put forward a proposal called 'Punctuated Equilibrium', a site-specific installation of both books and textiles and then completed almost all the pieces during my time as Writer/Artist in Residence at Hamilton Girls High School last spring and summer. I'll write more about the content of the exhibition in another post, but for now I want to tell you about the installation. It was wonderful to be working with the professionals at the Museum who made it a much easier process that other installations I have struggled though with the help of good friends but relatively few resources.
Dowel supports for paper scrolls
By far the biggest challenge of the installation was my Deep Time Scrolls: 570 metres of painted paper which I wanted to be laid out like rock strata up the back wall. Stu designed and built an structure to support the paper, and on Thursday morning Emily and I squeezed into the Vitrine to begin unrolling the scrolls. The tight, freshly painted, space was hot and stuffy and the arrangement of the paper full of awkwardness and uncertainty which made a very slow process.
Paper scrolls before installation
We were constantly interrupted, first and most significantly by the Prime Minister, John Key, who was visiting the Museum with security and ceremonial requirements that saw Em and I expelled from our install for an hour or more. (Naturally this did little drama did nothing to reverse my poor opinion of our smarmy leader). Throughout the day Emily was called away to assist other artists install their complicated entries in the NCAA. And I was also called away in the middle of the day in a futile attempt to transport My Antarctica to be photographed (a task finally completed on Sunday).
Emily, being tinier than me, bravely occupied the narrow end of the triangle for most of the day
With all these distractions and the labouriously slow paper work, it seemed criminal for me to decide in the middle that I needed to change the order of the colours on the wall. Rolling two scrolls back up and then laying them out again added another hour, though I have no regrets about that decision. It was near five by the time the back wall was finished to my satisfaction. Poor Emily called her partner to say she would be late home and spent another hour hanging four framed embroideries, a process involving some back tracking again as my original plan turned out not to be at all suitable.
Not long before I decided to rearrange the colour scheme
The pressure was on us to finish on Thursday because all the Museum staff would be away on Friday at a Treaty of Waitangi workshop. But that just wasn't possible so I came back and completed the installation alone. Well, I had the front of house staff for company, and was under the scrutiny of Museum visitors, who while less illustrious than the previous day, were more interested and outspoken. A group of pre-schoolers seemed quite amazed that there could be "a person in there".
All the kneeling, crawling and contorting of the previous day inside the glass triangle meant that on Friday, every movement was agony. My final step of the install was to place hundreds of embossed paper fossils to completely cover the floor. Unfortunately, having done that I stepped outside to admire the finished exhibition and immediately saw that the lighting needed to be adjusted. Once again I had to retrace my steps, moving all the embossed fossils off the floor, sorting out the lights and then carefully arranging the fossils again.
Then, finally, really, I was finished. By the time I'd spent time looking at the Vitrine from every angle, deciding I was quite pleased and taking plenty of photos, it was noon, and time for the Hamilton launch of National Poetry Day, so I took myself along to that, which will I will write about in my next post.
As if I wasnt already in love with Girls High girls, my Hamilton Girls High School Residency finished with a three day 'junior camp' for Year 9 &10 (13-15 years old). Students are offered about 30 options ranging from windsurfing or a train trip to Wellington to stay-at-home day camps with an arts focus. I was offering one of the latter, and had ten of the loveliest girls sign on, along with 4 teachers (three part-time)- an enviable adult:student ratio for such a low risk activity!
Unstructured studio time
My idea for the camp, called 'Living a Creative Life in Hamilton' was to give the girls a taste of life as an artist/writer in residence; and to counter the persistant image of Hamilton as a dull, stifling environment that people should escape in order to fully develop their creative selves*.
The first morning was an intensive workshop to make a blank labyrinth style journal to use for the rest of the camp. Everyone completed their books in time to take them along on our afternoon crawl around four exhibitions. Most students said their favourite of the afternoon was the Wintec 3rd year painting students, I think because the show was varied and vibrant, with work produced mostly by people only a few years older than my students and thus similar cultural perspectives.
Jessica inking up her comic, a long term project, nearly completed
On the second and third mornings we had unstructured studio time, which was when it really became clear that this group of girls had picked the right programme for themselves. I provided a variety of tools and simple materials for journalling and other paper crafts, made a few suggestions and let them do what they want. It was possibly the quietest and most productive three hours a group of teenagers has ever spent together. Beautiful, creative journalling emerged with many girls delighting in drawing cards from Keri Smith's100 ideas** and using them to spark all sorts of wonderful pages.
A spread from Codie's journal
A couple of girls mostly just wanted to read novels and I couldn't see the point of trying to make them do anything else. When I was that age, novel reading was my preferred activity in almost every situation- if I had been offered a reading camp, that's the one I would have chosen! Novel reading continues to be one of the most significant external influence on my creative work, so I think reading fit right into the theme and purpose of the camp.
morning in the camp studio
Our quiet, self directed time in the morning was a good grounding for our afternoons of going out into the town. On Tuesday we participated in an arts event for World AIDS Day in Garden Place. My Fairly radical Crafty group and Hamilton Pride had prepared handpainted red lasercut hearts of card attached to bamboo stakes and provided a couple of tables of crafty supplies. People could decorate or write on the heats and then we installed them on the lawn in a loose heart shape. The camp girls took to this project with great enthusiasm, not only decorating hearts but recruiting heart-decorating passers-by, and collecting funds while giving out red ribbons. It was great experience of sharing one's creativity with community for a good cause.
making hearts and sheltering from the rain
I believe living a creative life must include some cafe sitting and book browsing, so after our efforts with the hearts I rewarded the girls with huge bowls of hot chocolate at Metropolis, followed by a leisurely look around Browsers Second Hand Bookshop. The latter was named as a camp highlight by some, and I think was an eye-opening pleasure for others who hadn't been anywhere like that before.
heart art for World AIDS Day
All week the spring weather has been grey and drizzly at best, and rainy and muggy at worst, so I cancelled my plans for our final afternoon of picnicking and ephemeral environmental art making by the lake. Instead, we had an indoor picnic feast and then went across the road to tour ArtMakers Trust, a training establishment for creative young people. Sylvie welcomed us warmly, the work of ArtMakers is interesting and meaningful, and the trainees are kindred spirits to my camp girls, so I won't be surprised if some return to ArtMakers in a few years.
While I was out getting our indoor picnic food, the girls made a thankyou mural on the white board
*If you've been following my blog this year, you can probably tell that nothing is further from the truth. Hamilton is alight with all sorts of creative opportunities for producers and audiences to enjoy and be challenged by. ** I printed out the pdf onto coloured card and cut them into little squares to be drawn from a bag. I've tried to get adult friends to use these cards for inspiration, but until the camp no-one had really liked them. I've done just a few cards myself, but I haven't yet been short of my own ideas and creative tasks since I've made Keri's cards, so I'm saving them for a dry time, which will eventually come. I'm also looking forward to kicking my butt out of some future slough of self-pity with Keri's Artist's Survival Kit.
It is good to have an end to journey towards, but it is the journey that matters, in the end. - Ursula K LeGuin
It's almost the end of my term as the Sunrise Waikato RotaryWriter in Residence at Hamilton Girls High School, although the Principal is letting me stay in the studio through the summer holidays. When she offered I almost cried with relief as I've been increasingly concerned about how I was going to squeeze my studio back into my bedroom and somehow carry on with the large-scale works-in-progress I started, but didn't finish, during the Residency.
I choose to rent a bedroom in a shared flat rather than fulfil my dream of living in my own house for much the same reasons that I choose not to own a car. Partly I'm trying to minimise my ecological footprint, but more selfishly I'm minimising my expenses so I can devote most of my energy to my creative work rather than toiling full time in the well-paying career I drifted away from a few years ago. Sometimes my creative work is financially rewarding (for example this Residency came with a stipend) but being paid for art or writing has been the exception in my experience so far.
Because of my low-cost lifestyle I enjoy a great deal of freedom and some aspects of my life make other people envious. I am my own boss and control my own time, in which I write poetry, make art, learn new things and am free to follow my intuition. I'm aware and grateful that I am living (at least part) of a collective dream life.
One of the reasons that I can arrange my life this way in my 40s, is because when I was young I chose a path not usually associated with fulfilling one's dreams: I was a teenage single mother. That experience taught me to be frugal, to be decisive, to overcome obstacles and to accept help when I need it. Most of all, it set me free to explore in my late 30s, when many of my peers are immersed in child raising and mortgage servicing; and look back at the freedom of their childless 20s with nostalgia.
It's no coincidence that my practice and my identity as an artist emerged at exactly the same time as my daughter was launching herself into adult independence. I had spent most of her childhood pursuing my youthfully idealistic dream of saving the world through public policy. Two degrees, a couple of government departments and councils, and something like a nervous breakdown later, I was ready to be completely selfish for the first time in my adult life. So when I discovered artist's books and that I was quite good at them, I gradually extracted myself from the public service to became a full time artist.
Of course, the reality is that fledgling artists have as much chance of making a living from their art as winning the lotto. When I eventually used up the savings that could have been a house deposit in the 1970s, I figured out a frugal lifestyle of part-time paid work and full time art work. This was so successful that at the same time as preparing my first solo show I managed to save up something that could have been a house deposit in the 1960s.
But then two years ago I impulsively decided to pursue my idiosyncratic 2o year dream of living in a treehouse in the Daintree Rainforest. I'm still making sense of how important it was for me to spend 7 months at Cape Tribulation, even though at the time it seemed like I was spinning my wheels at the end of the road. When my savings ran out and the extreme and isolated environment proved inimical with the rest of my dreams I returned to Hamilton where I knew it would be easiest to get traction towards the life I want.
Fulfilling such a long held yet whimsical dream is something that most people seem to assign to their 'if I win lotto' wish list. But to do so undervalues and undermines our dreams with really bad odds instead of intention, planning, effort and sacrifice or even trust, any of which will do more to fulfil your dreams than buying lotto tickets every week. Dreams that are worth fulfilling are worth better than lottery odds.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a long distance truck driver when I grew up. Unfortunately, it turns out that I don't actually like driving and I abandoned that dream without a backward glance. Dreams change over time, but it's not the specifics of your dreams that matter, it's the essence of them.
As a child I thought that being a truck driver would allow me the same kind of headspace that I enjoyed on our family's long road trips when nothing was expected of me in the back seat except to sit still, be quiet, and not fight with my brother. I could just look out the window, let my mind wander and daydream.
I came out of the trees exactly one year ago with no idea what I wanted to do next. I didn't have a plan, I didn't even have a specific dream as remotely compelling as the one I had just fulfilled. In retrospect, what I did have was a renewed commitment to the essence of my childhood dream of maintaining the head space to observe the world, explore ideas and imagine alternate realities. As an adult I have set up my life so that this essential freedom of thought is manifest in creative expression: making books, stitching images and sculptures. My youthful idealism continues to be manifested in the critical environmental themes I research and interpret, and in my participation in a community of activist artists and crafters.
As my birthday, the end of the year and the decade all approach, it seems appropriate to review my dreams, achievements and plans. I originally wrote this piece for the School of Education's Professional Development Department. They had me present it on a moving bus as it travelled through the Waikato countryside. I broke up my personal story by getting them each to talk to their seatmates about their 'lotto wish list', their childhood dreams and how the essence of their dreams can be manifest in their lives now.
All photos taken by me on the Daintree Coast, July 2009
Artist's books on exhibit at Hamilton Girls High School (NB click on any photo to see enlarged details)
Although I've never curated before (other than my own work), I'm always up for the steep learning curve, so I offered to curate an exhibition of artist's books at Girls High towards the end of my Residency. With the help of my #1 Open Studio girls we got the show up today, and looking pretty good, if I might say so myself.
Human Rights themed books from Year 10 Art students
The exhibition consists of some of my work and many books created by students during my time at school. My contributions include Deep Time Writer's Residency, a tunnel book that I made to fulfil the school's commission as part of the Residency. I'm also showing various works in progress as photographs or as actual books such as my Residency journal and some 277 million years of painted scrolls.
Deep Time Writer's Residency, a tunnel book (more about this one in a future post)
The largest work in the exhibition is a collaboration between me and the students who've been coming along to my Open Studio sessions. We've made a lantern book with an abridged version of my favourite poem that I've written during the Residency, If Jellyfish Wrote History.
Jellyfish Lantern Book
The girls and I have spent several weeks folding 100 paper lanterns, some with the words of the poem, and some decorated to represent jellyfish. It's been a fantastic project and a dozen or more girls have contributed at least one or two lanterns, with a stalwart crew putting in many lunch hours of origami with me.
Isabel, Deahna and Aleisha have been loyal Open Studio participants since I arrived at school, and helped install the exhibition.
Other Open Studio regulars have their own book projects included in the exhibition. Of special note is Cheri's Tale by Jessica Imswary and Aimee McGregor who have worked very hard to complete their lengthy manga comic. Their good-humoured collaboration and mutual commitment to meeting the exhibition deadline has been outstanding.
Jessica and Aimee spending yet another lunch hour making their comic in my studio.
A spread from Cheri's Tale by Jessica and Aimee
Almost half of the student contributions have come from several Year 10 art classes taught by Jennifer Fernyhough and Nellie Ward Wallace. These classes made artist's books as their major project last term, using previous social studies research into human rights as their content. The intense subject matter (the Holocaust, Apartheid, slavery etc) and the devotion of many classroom hours has produced some very powerful and moving artist's books.
Jews in the Holocaust
Most of the other student books on show were created in Year 9 &10 English classes that I worked with for just 1-3 sessions. Hundreds of girls have made little books with me over the past 3 months and it was certainly difficult to choose just a few to include in the show. Almost all the books have original content: poetry or stories and illustrations which provide a light, playful contrast to the intensity of the human rights books.
Lots of little books from junior English classes and Open Studios
The school's senior students have been immersed in end of year assessments for most of my tenure, but I did get to work with one Year 13 extension English class. They made some wonderful books, represented in the exhibition by Baily Stewart's stunning 'A film guide to Psycho'. As with the best artist's books it is impossible for a photograph to do Baily's work justice: it harmoniously combines a variety of structural elements with a limited colour palette to powerfully convey her analysis of the classic film.
A film guide to Psycho by Baily Stewart, Year 13
The exhibition is up until 24 November and members of the public can view it during school hours. If you are in Hamilton please come to the Atrium in the Administration Block (the big glass building accessed from Ward Street). I'm sure you will be impressed.
Isabel Brooker made this scroll as an independent project
Arranging paper strata inside the Vitrine
Dowel supports for paper scrolls
Paper scrolls before installation
Emily, being tinier than me, bravely occupied the narrow end of the triangle for most of the day
Not long before I decided to rearrange the colour scheme
The finished wall and floor
