David Eggleton
Modern Women: Flight of time edited by Julia Waite (Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2024) 283pp, $65; Wing Dust: Exploring the eccentric mind of the artist June Black by Sheridan Keith (The Cuba Press, 2024) 293pp, $40; Sight Lines: Women and art in Aotearoa by Kirsty Baker (Auckland University Press, 2024), 444pp, $70
‘What makes modern art “modern” is the participation of woman artists,’ suggests Kirsten Lacy, the director of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki in her Foreword to Modern Women: Fight of time, edited by Julia Waite. But ‘modern’ is itself a vexed or ambivalent term, generating different shades of meaning according to context. Modern Women: Flight of time takes us back to an era—covering from around 1920 to around 1970—when for a woman artist to be ‘thoroughly modern’ was to challenge the status quo: it’s what Waite in her measured and cogent introductory essay, titled ‘Once More, with Feeling’, calls the ‘paternalistic past’.
The book itself showcases a 2024 exhibition of the same name at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, presented as a reappraisal or reassessment of ‘under-recognised’ women artists, while also acknowledging that ‘art histories are always partial’, always themselves subject to eventual revision. Containing over 120 illustrations—paintings, sculptures, textiles, photographs—the book offers, as well, short and generally excellent evaluations or considerations of forty-four women artists by a variety of commentators, ranging from Vincent O’Sullivan to Jill Trevelyan to Cameron Ah-Loo Matamua to Joanne Drayton and Lucy Hammonds.
Curator Julia Waite has taken her choices of what is included in the book exclusively from artworks that are held in public collections around New Zealand, and then arranged them under three thematic labels intended to emphasise the items as theatrical forms of self-assertion or self-declaration. The artworks form ‘an ensemble cast’, categorised variously as: ‘Stage’ (scenes from modern life and episodes taken from the Bible, or else taken from classical and Māori mythology, affirming female deities and archetypes); ‘Mask’ (portraits and still-lifes, metaphorically expressing ‘a spectrum of emotions’); ‘Setting’ (works emphasising home and belonging, or the world outside as landscape, townscape, oceanscape).
Arguably, in the two decades between World War I and World War II, women rather than men were the dominant force in New Zealand art. In this they epitomised modernity, which was about social and cultural change. The ‘new woman’ had emerged: an independent figure seeking self-expression on her own terms. She took risks, travelling widely in pursuit of ‘artistic truth’, defying conservative values, and often maintaining a career at the cost of having a family. Expatriate Frances Hodgkins was emblematic of the new woman artist; she embodied assertiveness, adventurousness, determination, a personal point of view.
It was a time of internationalism. Other New Zealand women artists toing and froing included Mina Arndt, Flora Scales and Edith Collier, while we learn that in the 1930s ‘many outstanding Australian artists turned out to be New Zealanders’, notably Maud Sherwood. The book contains, too, works that have found their way into New Zealand collections by overseas woman artists: Laura Knight, Eileen Agar, Anne Estelle Rice, Barbara Hepworth, Natalia Goncharova. And there are significant works by woman artists who migrated here in the middle years of the twentieth century, such as Louise Henderson, Margot Philips, Ilse von Randow, Tanya Ashken, Jenny Campbell and Samoan artist Teuane Tibbo. Māori artists to feature include Mary Wirepa, Pauline Yearbury and Kāterina Mataira.
And yet these motivated woman artists struggled; they often had to eke out a precarious living. And while their work emphasised triumphant female allegories, they were often confronted in their daily lives by the prejudice that women should not be autonomous or have agency. Mainstream opinion belittled their work, or damned with faint praise: ‘charming, in an unimportant sort of way’.
One response to being marginalised, underestimated or rendered nearly invisible, was for women artists to band together, occasionally along with male artists. Waite lists some of these semi-formal associations of artists who supported one another—the New Group and the Phoenix Group in Auckland, the Thursday Group in Wellington, the Group in Christchurch. And there were other less formal circles, such as Wellington female potters looking out for one another in the 1950s. Another subtle or discreet form of support was provided by networks of ‘friends’—what Waite indentifies as the ‘Queer milieu’ where women were able to move around freely with companions, or sometimes chaperones, without being stopped by officialdom.
Modern Women: Flight of time is, in a sense, a big gallery rehang: a shaking up of rusted-on narratives based around ‘cultural nationalism’ and ‘abstraction’, and hierarchies of cultural practice where artisanal and craft work forms such as potting and weaving were seen as lesser art forms. It’s a book in which Waite acknowledges that there are yet ‘more chapters to be written in the alternative histories of New Zealand art’, and where she attempts to suggest what these might look like, with the curious case of ‘Florence Weir’—added at the end—stating ‘a fabricated history … can act as a placeholder for marginalised histories.’ Florence Weir is the alter ego of contemporary artist Julia Holderness, who offers pastiche or parodic artworks. Somehow, this twee postmodern persona, ‘Florence Weir’, with her faux mimicry of artworks produced in the 1930s, seems to have wandered in from another exhibition, another book, altogether.
One turns back instead to the colour plate ‘Characterisation in Colour’, a portrait painted in 1941 by May Smith. Done in jazzy, hot, even sizzling colours, it is, in its bold, gauche simplicity, an artwork that positively leaps out of its time to confront us head-on. May Smith’s sitter was the poet Marie Conlon (there is a moody photograph of her in the book, taken by Clifton Firth). She was recovering from an operation on the cancer that was to take her life two years later at the age of thirty. She was a Catholic questioning her religion, fervently anti-fascist, and a supporter of socialism. She personifies, then, that mood of anguish that haunted young idealists of the time as war raged around the world.
Partly Waite’s intention in her book has been to construct a matrix that allows revenant protofeminists to emerge from the shadows. There is Jaqueline Fahey’s ‘Women at the Sink’ (1959), part of her Suburban Neurosis series; a painting that Waite assesses as ‘one of the first explicitly post-war feminist artworks’. And then there is the art of June Black (1910–2009), whom Waite describes as genuinely ‘visionary’, with an ‘irreverent and pathos-filled view of the world’. The obscure Black is accorded ten artwork illustrations in Modern Women: Flight of time: the most granted to any of its artists, for she clearly exemplifies the myth of the self-fashioned artist. The profile on her is provided by the writer Sheridan Keith, Black’s daughter.
Sheridan Keith is also the author of the memoir Wing Dust: Exploring the eccentric mind of the artist June Black, which is at once her mother’s biography, an account of the author’s complex relationship with her mother, and an anthology drawn from Black’s own writings, selected from her obsessively-kept journals and scrapbooks—which the artist referred to as her ‘sausage-books’ because everything went into them. On the evidence of the artworks depicted in both books, we can see that Black had a gift for the tactile and was skilful at creating what might be called ‘uncanny objects’. She also had a knack for locating the absurdist comedy in situations.
Keith provides vignettes, short stories and anecdotes that deliver an entertaining sense of her mother’s enthusiasms, obsessions and flirtations—as well as her constant hunger for philosophical and intellectual nourishment. She was an autodidact who haunted the Wellington Public Library and carted home books to incessantly copy inspiring quotations from. In a sense, Black was every-woman, any-woman, no-woman. Though born in Auckland, she lived in North America until she was sixteen, and when her parents separated she returned to Auckland with her mother and there married young. As Keith tells us: ‘Up until the 1950s when Mother was in her forties, there is nothing in her behaviour to suggest she was anything other than a rather interesting and amusing, though certainly bored, housewife and mother.’ Then, between 1950 and 1951: ‘my mother underwent a most unexpected transformation’.
At a time when many, if not most, New Zealanders regarded the artist Picasso as someone ‘having a laugh at the viewer’s expense’, Black took him as one of her exemplars. Art became something of an antidote to the dourness, insularity and self-righteousness common in the New Zealand of the 1950s. Quoting from Black’s journals, her daughter illuminates her struggle to realise herself as an artist: ‘I think I would be happier if I did not have this art affliction. I could be a happy smug housewife like the woman next door, her soul a tidy dishcloth.’ Instead: ‘All I have wanted to paint was people struggling against life’s ugly jokes and their pitiful attempts to protect themselves with brave costumes.’
Keith recounts the well-remembered saga from the mid-1950s of an electric kiln manufactured overseas arriving at their family home in a Wellington suburb into a basement space created by her father—‘The kiln had to be nursed into existence’—and her mother’s subsequent prolific output of paintings, pottery, ceramic sculptures and jewellery. In the late 1950s she held sell-out exhibitions at Wellington’s small Architectural Centre Gallery, one of the few independent and progressive art venues in the country, as well as at the short-lived first modern private dealer gallery in Christchurch, Gallery 91, set up by the artist Andre Brooke and his wife Barbara Brooke.
Sheridan Keith’s narrative, nuanced and literary, develops from a child’s perspective eye-view to that of an observant adult watching her mother’s gradual descent into ill-health and terminal illness, met with the acerbic humour of someone who has endured it all stoically. The whole memoir is a form of tribute, a kind of modernistic collage, its diaristic reportage catching the lilt and idiom of an individual whose ‘engaging energy and wit … outrageous remarks and fearlessness’ resisted conformity until the end.
In a way, Sight Lines: Women and art in Aotearoa by Kirsty Baker and Modern Women: Flight of time are complementary texts or histories. Baker’s account of women and art mostly concentrates on art made after 1970 up until the present day, while also discussing some of the same artists, including Frances Hodgkins, Louise Henderson, Teuane Tibbo, Elizabeth Ellis and Mere Harrison Lodge.
However, its essential thematic focus is both on the conspicuously collaborative—women artists working together—and on art as politics by other means. Ultimately, Sight Lines offers a more dissonant and dissident account of women making art. Baker is the Pākehā art historian as activist, intent not only on recuperating the forgotten, the neglected, the erased, the sidelined, but also insistent on women’s art-making as a radical indeed subversive act: a critique of patriarchal power structures and repressive ideologies. In this, in the book, she is supported by a number of other essayists—all of Māori or Moana heritage—looking at specific topics or artists in order to offer diverse ways of unpicking ‘women and art in Aotearoa’.
The book’s title, Sight Lines, invokes multiple perspectives, multiple ways of seeing, while the cover design, with its blocks of colour and emphatic lettering like signage, asserts the book’s programmatic or didactic purpose. Here, lines of sight have been interrupted or else offer just enigmatic glimpses of limbs, of arms, of skin. This is a close-up of body shapes but turned into something occluded, partly hidden, offering indeterminacy and resistance to wholesale scrutiny or surveillance. Instead, there is the suggestion of intense self-consciousness, of period-era consciousness-raising, for this is a movie still, adapted from Joanna Margaret Paul’s 1975 digital video ‘Body/House’.
The book’s sub-title, meanwhile, carefully delineated into three areas of consideration—‘women’, ‘art’, ‘Aotearoa’—acknowledges that these can be contestable notions. The inclusion of trans artist Aliyah Winter and fa’afafine artist Yuki Kihara are acknowledgements that ‘gender’ is performative rather than defined by biology.
The centre of the book is a consideration of the legacy of the 1970s: the era of nascent identity protests and liberation movements that often incorporated or celebrated art-making as a form of group assertion. Art, then, is resistance, argument, display; about this, all the sight-lines are in agreement. Multi-media artist Vivian Lynn offers the observation that art should be about ‘the social conditioning that dictates our lived experience’; while photographer Fiona Clark documents part of the Taranaki coastline—important to iwi for food-gathering—as a way of protesting against ‘Eurocentric notions of extractive land usage and private owners’.
Focusing on power dynamics, from the Bastion Point protests, to contemporary feminism’s own internal tensions, to the way art galleries present exhibitions, to cultural representations of female stereotypes, Baker engages with a roll-call of dissenting artists whose artworks question, challenge or subvert various manners and modes. Artists from Merata Mita to Ayesha Green to Ruth Buchanan to Imogen Taylor establish a continuum with the manifestos of the 1970s: with the work of Broadsheet magazine and the Spiral Women’s Art Collective and others. Baker’s successful aim has been to make Sight Lines a product of many voices, ‘beyond the simplicity of the singular story’ at a time when feminist politics have been fractured ‘along lines of culture, race, sexuality and class’.
So, one solution that continues to inspire her and her co-writers is the notion of ‘collective modes’ of art-making: figuratively connecting up the socialist collective, the art school collective, the indigenous tribal collective. This is idealism that pragmatically asserts ‘collaboration and reciprocity … community over competition, expansiveness over gatekeeping’. Such collective action offers a way to undo ‘a narrow and restrictive canon’. Concerned with thorny or knotty or problematic strategies for the representation of women’s concerns by women, Sight Lines is a kind of manual, affirming solidarity with both grassroots feminism and flaxroots wāhine toa activism. It’s a book that insists the art of commonality can still transcend and transform the world.
DAVID EGGLETON is a writer, poet and editor based in Ōtepoti Dunedin.
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