Teaching Tour and Postscript

“Quilter” is not a frequent response to the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And yet when I think of the friends I’ve made and the places I’ve visited because I learned to transfer the images in my head to fabric and thread, it seems like a pretty good response, notwithstanding the number of suitcases I need to bring on my teaching adventures. After a month of playing with friends in Auckland, it was time to pack my bags, farm some of them out to people who had volunteered to drive them south, and head to Wellington to get to work.

The scenic twelve hour train trip allowed more time to visit with Ailie and deposited us in the nation’s capitol, where we spent a few days visiting galleries before I set up my classroom as the 5 day Wellington Quilt Symposium began. It was a massive undertaking three years in the planning, run entirely by volunteers, and attended by about 2,000 people. At the welcome tea I met other tutors from Ireland, Kenya, The Netherlands, England, Australia, NZ and yes, even the US. Two days into the symposium, we were guests at the symposium’s huge gala dinner held at Te Papa, the National Museum, where some of us felt decidedly underdressed amid the crowd of boa-, sequin- and tiara-wearing attendees. We dined on a 3 course meal, gaped at the surreal entertainment consisting of a green chiffon-clad belly dancer twirling hula hoops, a wandering magician and a seriously unfunny comic, hosted by an Anthony Hopkin-look-alike dressed as the Duke of Wellington -- all held within 15 feet of the entrance to the Monet show, shipped in from Boston. I am not making any of this up.

The "Duke" of Wellington

Accompanied by my gathering mound of baggage, I flew west from Wellington to New Plymouth, where baggage claim consisted of a tractor with a cart behind it driving into the airport terminal. The volunteer who met my plane dropped the suitcase mountain off at the motel and me at the edge of the Tasman Sea, where I walked along the promenade under Len Lye’s Wind Wand, beside the Tasman gazing west out to the ocean and east to the volcanic cone of Mt. Taranaki.

My motel, a mile or two up the hill, shared those views and sat next to a racetrack fringed with grazing horses. Some of the creative women in my New Plymouth class had been in my class when I’d taught at the symposium they’d hosted 8 years ago. During morning tea, an interruption American tutors have to learn to plan for (and then to look forward to), they showed me quilts they’d made with the dyed fabric from that class.

morning tea

More luggage wrangling and a three-part flight to the South Island (or the Mainland, as South Islanders puzzlingly refer to it) landed me in Wanaka. The view from town, perched at the end of the eponymously named lake, is punctuated by the Remarkable mountain range, a geographical feature that sounds as if it had been named by wide-eyed flatlanders who had never seen hills before and were suitably impressed. During the 5 days I taught at the Wanaka Autumn Art School, I opened my motel door to views of the frost covered hills and then walked to the school whose classrooms buzzed with workshops in everything from writing to woodcarving, led by well-known Australian and New Zealand artists and authors. My class collaborated with some students in the woodblock printmaking class next door, producing some beautiful prints on dyed fabric. And I had the odd experience of making conversation with an author whose memoirs I had just read -- trying to concentrate on the calm middle-aged woman across the table from me and not envision the searching, rebellious woman I’d been reading about.

I became quite morose in the Wanaka airport as I wrestled my two full-weight bags and one large carry-on rollie (which turned out not to be a carry-on on this leg of the trip) into the tiny terminal and then turned to watch the writing instructor wheel her one carry-on size bag in and park it behind me in line. Perhaps my response to the life choice question should have been “Writer.”

the hills of Wanaka

One last class in Christchurch, with a few people in it I recognized from my residency at the Christchurch Arts Centre two years ago, and one last drag/pull/push of my ballooning baggage into the downtown Y. I delivered a quilt to the arts centre to thank them for my residency and was happy to hear that they planned to frame and hang it near Rutherford’s Den, which honors the Nobel prize- winning physicist who was first to split the atom (and thus facilitated those gorgeous bubble chamber images that inspired the series I’ve been working on for the last two years). Freda flew down when my classes ended, and we walked to every Christchurch art gallery within a two mile radius, revisited a retrospective of Rita Angus, a New Zealand artist whose exhibit we’d seen in Wellington last October, and got to meet the director of the documentary about her, who happened to be in town and showing her movie the night we were there.

All this—the people, the places, the experiences-- because I became not a linguist or a translator, as I had planned when I set off for university, but a quilter. And the only thing that makes me think twice about falling into this career choice is the juggling, hefting, and repacking of luggage that seems to be part of the job description. But the two eerily existential questions that flashed on the check-in screens at the Christchurch airport, “Are you still there? Would you like more time?” were easy for me to answer. And when I arrived back home, greeted by the love of my life, I noticed another life-decision query on the terminal in the Portland baggage area. This one asked “Do you want to continue?” and I could only answer, yes, yes, yes.