Yesyesyesyesyes

My policy when I return to New Zealand is simple: Say Yes. When friends invite me to events I haven’t heard about, I gratefully reply, “Yes, please,”  buy a bottle of wine to ensure future invitations, and toddle off. In the past two weeks, my strict Embrace Yes policy has been my ticket to family dinners, road trips, studio visits, gallery rambles, video marathons, high tea and three evenings of Culchah in downtown Auclkland and its environs. Having a great time, wish you were here, but since you’re not, some impressions of a benefit concert for earthquake relief, a drama debut, and an authors' panel…

Singing for Christchurch

Bobby McFerrin walking onto the Sky Tower stage, dressed as casually as if headed to the corner grocery store, wordlessly seating himself and launching into an equally wordless song from somewhere – Africa? Asia? Here and not here. Mesmerizing a sold-out audience, engaging the phalanx of choir members seated behind him – who haven’t met him before, haven’t practiced anything they’re now being shown to sing —with a flick of the wrist, a nod, a raised eyebrow. Turning to the audience later to ask, “D’you know Ave Maria?” and on nothing but trust and 10,000 hours of experience, singing the Bach underlay while the audience, who from the sound of it were given an evening off from singing in the Angel’s Chorus, sang the whole aria, knew the tune, the words, and ended in an Amen of harmony we must have practiced over and over in an alternate universe. Inviting two volunteers to come and sing with him one at a time, one providing tuneful comic relief and the other a heartstopping seductive improvised vocal pas de deux that made me realize when their last chord ended that I hadn’t breathed the whole time they were  singing.

A Night at the Theeaytah

Evening at the Maidment Theatre, downtown Auckland: Enter the theatre for the 6.30 (!) performance, settle in among an audience divided between the usual grey heads, a section of high school students and a dozen or so youths inexplicably dressed in the Full Mime – striped shirts, white faces, gloves. The elaborate set is aswirl with cloud or fog as we take our seats, then houselights dim and  the metaphorical curtain rises on an original play built around songs by a “world famous in New Zealand” (local phrase, not mine) musician. A home grown professional production, a Kiwi go at an experimental play: surreal melodrama interrupted by music. This particular experiment ticked all the Houston we have a problem boxes:  a twice life size papier mache zebra head, a dead man inhabiting a 7 year old’s body,  a father digging digging digging in the garden and bewildering rock songs with no discernible connection to the action, sung by actors who turn to the audience, a la Ethel Merman, before beginning to sing, giving us that split second to pray intensely, no, please, no, not another song. Hard to know what to say when my Kiwi friends turned to me, faces beaming, after the shamelessly milked ovation and asked how I liked it. Thought it might be a good moment to grab a mask, turn to the rows behind me, and belt out a tune. Still, better than the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical I saw in LA a decade ago at which people applauded the chandelier on the set. They would have loved the zebra head.

Authors Talking Among Themselves

Setting: a former convent newly born as an art museum filled with contemporary NZ art bought by the heir of a meat packing fortune. Title offered by the panel of authors: Nazis, Natives, and Nudity. And yet even with that gotcha title we were the only three audience members (other than Grae – one name--  the “temporary art” installer there to video the evening) until a minute before the event began. But then the magic of the written word takes over, along with the personalities of the three writers who read to us and questioned each other and somehow included us in the discussion, which  ranged from how “shutting the door to hold the audience at bay” while writing keeps you from second guessing your own voice to how you manage to sit at your computer again after a savage book review. Then they kicked off their Lucite 6” heels, switched chairs, and tucked their knees under them to discuss the ignominy of being disinvited to appear at a local library event because of the sex scenes the people in this “funny little Presbyterian country we live in,” were afraid you’d read and the importance of a good editor-- especially if you are dyslexic and  “can’t spell for toffee.” All of this, the reading of the torrid sex scene in question, the talk about writing to make time stop around a single image – is done with the meat packing heir who has funded all of it --the building, the art, the writer’s residency, the evening’s panel --sitting with his Tom Wolfe linen suit and his circus striped socks in the front row, with good, bizarre and downright odd sculpture visible through the window behind the authors, and with a glass of good NZ pinot gris in hand.

Homework

Compare and contrast.

Watch Bobby’s experiment with the pentatonic scale, then try to keep yourself from wondering how hard-wired we are for music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne6tB2KiZuk

If I’d seen this video of Poor Boy, the Split Enz song that lent its title to the play, I might have known to expect a wander down Surreal Boulevard.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcrRcUDAEYw

Scroll to the May 1 2009 blog entry, Collections, for more on what to do with an inherited meat-packing fortune.

What's Your Sign?

Signs Glimpsed In Passing -- Victoria, Australia

Boing

Disembodied Leg Crossing

Wombat crossings can take a while.

When the tram moved forward, an "M" came into view in front of this word,  changing it from a remarkable exhibit title perfectly categorizing some of the art I'm seen recently to just the usual artspeak.

Anybody Home?

Remember those great Michener novels, that began not with the birth of the protagonist but with the birth of the land itself? Those novels that read more like a geologic version of the Bible, with “In the beginning…” followed by hundreds of pages of description of volcanoes forming islands rising from the sea or mountain ranges pushed upward by chapters of continents grinding together? If I were to be Michenerian in this Australian blog,  it would be a very long time until I got to this week or two that Bill and I have been doodling around a very small part of this continent/country. Australia is an ancient land, which is evident in its rock formations honed by millennia of natural forces, by its thin top coat of top soil – all that remains after eons of blowing away or washing out to sea, by its peculiar fauna which have evolved in isolation since Gondwana’s  pieces split and inched away from each other 55 million years ago.

Dingo, Healesville Wildlife Sanctuary

Australia is so old that the dingo, which landed on Australia’s shores 5,000 years ago in Asian trading ships, is considered an arriviste and can stir up arguments about whether it’s a native animal. Try not to let the questions that come to mind when learning of Asian traders plying the ocean between Australia and home get in the way: Why didn’t Asians claim other lands as their own, as Europeans did? What did the Aboriginals have to trade, and what did they get from the Asians? And why were the Asians carrying an Asian wolf, which is what the dingoes were, on their ships? Like the Polynesians carrying rats in their canoes, it makes me think the committees deciding what to pack and what to leave behind had unique senses of humor.

The question of who is native and who belongs surfaces again when you look at the human settlement of the continent. Although some scientists say that the Aboriginals have lived on this land for 40 to 60 thousand years, when the British dumped their convicts in Sydney Harbor they declared the land Terra Nullis. Where Americans warred with, then signed bogus treaties with the natives -- or simply handed them smallpox-infected blankets – the British had a simpler answer: just say there’s no one home, then move in. Until the mid-seventies – that’s the mid nineteen 70’s—white Australians took Aboriginal children, especially mixed-race Aboriginal children—away from their families and either adopted them out to white people (who often used them as servants) or shipped them to missions. The plan was to breed the blackness out of the race. The effect was to dislocate a culture to whom the land was life, history, and family. It was only three years ago that Kevin Rudd issued an apology to the Stolen Generation. In the 15 years since we last visited Australia, signs have begun to appear in parks and scenic overlooks acknowledging the indigenous populations linked to that land, finally admitting that the terra was not nullis when the convicts came ashore. But we talked with people, on this trip in 2011,  who claimed that the policy of taking children away from their parents resulted in better lives for the children, in that same anecdotal way that Reagan used to use to cloud the issue of the larger effect of government policies. And much like readers of Gone With the Wind will recognize: we too wanted to believe in the happy slave myth to avoid confronting ourselves in the mirror.

GOR between Wye River & Lorne --signs that wouldn't have been here 20 years ago

As we watch the dismantling of the American education system with funding cuts, union breaking, and Texan textbooks, we might take a cautionary tale from Down Under. The people I’ve talked with, aged 35 and up, know more about British history than their own. Cultural cringe was real here until just a few decades ago – even their gardening books were imported from Britain, and everyone accepted they just had to add 6 months to the recommended planting times—so few white Australians knew they had descended from convicts (except for those living in South Australia who proudly, and accurately, proclaimed that they were not) and fewer still knew anything about aboriginal history or government policy toward indigenous people. It is hard to make good public policy based on cultural myth rather than historical fact.

For years Australia wanted only British immigrants – witness the “Ten Pound Pom” policy after WWII, offering ten pound sea tickets to British families relocating to Australia. Was it a way of underlining their invented definition of who had been here long enough to claim the land? And now that Australia has relaxed its immigration policy to grow its economy, the Asians have returned, as have other non-British ethnicities who believe that life would be better here on the fringes of an ancient continent. It’s unclear how long it will take for them to be considered Australian – perhaps less than 5,000 years.

 Koalas on road to Cape Otway Lighthouse, GOR

Not in Kansas

Australia Blog

From being feted with a palatial suite at one quilt conference – it was bigger than my first apartment, and much more expensively furnished – to being put up in volunteer’s homes in rooms that are clearly more storeroom than guest room, the accommodations part of my teaching travels is always a bit of a crap shoot. At this conference in the middle of a national park 3 hours NW of Melbourne, Australia, teachers were stowed in a caravan park in cabins next to camp sites for tents and Winnebagos. The cabins were clean prefab jobs with verandas and full kitchens. I was surprised to find that the single room stated on my contract was a single room in a shared cabin, but how else would I have had the experience of comparing teaching experiences with a Tasmanian roommate?

The conference organizer fed all the teachers breakfast each morning, and I knew I wasn’t in Portland when I encountered an emu and kangaroos foraging for their morning brekkie on my short walk to her cabin. The human Ozzie natives at the breakfast gathering assured me that the monkeys that had woken me up in the morning were not misplaced primates, but their avian sound-alikes, kookaburras. They proved to be my alarm clock for the rest of the week, laughing into my window at 6.45 each morning.

A kangaroo with a joey in her pocket greeted me outside my classroom door on my first teaching morning, to remind me things are different here. So different that my classroom was the poolside rec room in a campground further up the road in the park. No matter where I am, my teaching days usually begin with a half hour of room rearranging, and in this venue I pushed couches around the fireplace for a gathering spot and tables to the windows since the classroom had a total of six light bulbs. From my days of working in the Arts in Education program in Portland schools, where I dyed fabric in bathrooms with kindergarteners, to the odd classroom experience of mixing dyes in a carpeted, upholstered formal dining room of a Caribbean cruise ship, I’ve discovered that problem solving and flexibility are as high on the job description as teaching skills. I’m pretty good at both, as I suspect many women are, but what I’ve learned on the job over the years is when to stop being flexible and demand a better situation for my students. The student stuck in a dim crowded claustrophic corner near the bathroom isn’t going to be a happy camper no matter how well I teach. Since the sun shone during our class, six lightbulbs were sufficient to keep people happily at work. The deep wells of fabric paint a local supplier sent, along with the morning teas of scones and muffins, didn’t hurt either, so flexibility won the day over confrontation.

Bill arrived toward the end of my second class, after a heroic solo drive from the Melbourne airport – undertaken after a 14 hour flight -- and on the left side of the road to boot. He was smart and decided on the option of renting a GPS, and I think the device, quickly dubbed Valerie Victoria, smoothed the way for him. In this second classroom (this time booked in a spacious, albeit equally dim, hotel conference room with a terrifyingly hideous red carpet which no amount of room arranging could obscure) I laid out the map of Australia Bill had bought at the airport, and my class took on the project of helping us to decide which bits of Victoria we would tour after the conference ended. We took on their advice and an additional passenger after they gifted me with a wonderful stuffed wombat named Wally who despite being the burly silent type knew his way around the area. With the help of Wally’s innate geographical knowledge and Valerie’s computer-generated Ozzie accent, we found our way around the Grampian byways that remained open after last month’s floods, then on to the Great Ocean Road. We had a bit of a where-am-I experience as we pulled into our first night’s lodging – in Portland. We are chagrined to admit we were so busy figuring out which direction to head the next morning, we left without the expected photo of two Oregonian Portlanders standing by a Victoria Portland sign.

Twelve Apostles, Great Ocean Road

Our week of post-class touring gave us views of the Southern Ocean graced by land formations I would love to translate to fabric, encounters with koalas, kangaroos, emus, and wallabies in the wild, vast windfarms, and glimpses of Australian art in a succession of mostly free museums scattered across the state, in big and little towns. Most of all, it gave us slices of other people’s stories: the students who have lived through drought and fire, floods and locusts and were driven to translate those experiences into their artwork, the couple at the breakfast table next to ours in little Port Campbell who called everyone they knew to announce their engagement while waiting for their meals (for those who are interested in these slice of life dramas, he had the ring designed especially for her; I’m guessing he was pretty certain of her answer), the teacher who has started her own yarn supply business and travels to Shanghai and Italy to talk with her manufacturers.

So no matter where I lay my head after class, this strange and accidental career of mine allows me to gather images and stories en route to the (sometime under-lit and dubiously appointed) classrooms filled with interesting women eager to stitch their visions with fabric and thread. I may luxuriate in the times I am housed in one of those resorts with marble lined loos, but even the accommodations that give me tents as neighbors provide me with bonuses like an antipodean morning zoo and verandas looking beyond the campers to the hills and bush of a national park.

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.

Collections

Imagine a collection of thousands of paintings and sculptures owned by a single man. Imagine that number of works crammed into a private home the size of a large Dunthorpe manse. Now imagine making that collection, and that private home, available, gratis, to community groups seeking to use the space for a fund raiser or any group of interested viewers who submit a simple online application. Welcome to Rannoch, the large Craftsman-inspired house owned by James Wallace. http://www.wallaceartstrust.org.nz/?s1=rannoch

Wallace, heir to a fortune built by meat and tanned hides, is a major art philanthropist in New Zealand. He collects the art work of NZ artists, supports NZ art initiatives, and founded the biannual Wallace Awards. These awards bestow cash, mana and a year-long NYC art residency on New Zealand artists and assure that their work will be included in the 4,500 piece Wallace Collection.

A week after I submitted the application to the Wallace Trust, notice arrived that we’d be welcome to tour the house if we could come the following day. After a flurry of phone calls and a visit to Google Maps, we agreed to meet at 10 the next day outside Rannoch, which turned out to be tucked between the roaring Auckland motorway and a tree-lined, poorly marked Epsom street. A glimpse behind the artist-designed metal security gate into the large garden crowded with sculptures and native bush convinced us we’d correctly followed the treasure map.

Rannoch entry gate

We buzzed the intercom and waited till we heard the voice of the German housekeeper instructing us to enter. Since Mel Brooks’ humor seems not to have made it to NZ, no one but me needed to stifle a giggle as images of Cloris Leachman in Young Frankenstein leapt, unbidden, to mind. I half expected to hear a horse ninny in outrage as Carla, the housekeeper, gave us entry instructions through the crackly intercom.

Carla, who turned out to be more art history graduate than Brooksian device, flicked on the lights and instructed us how to navigate the house. She asked us to not open the doors marked Private, but other than that left us on our own to wander at will. So four free range fiber artists roamed, unescorted, around this wealthy collector’s home for 3 hours, gobsmacked as much by the freedom as the artwork. We also agreed that we could happily spend a week in his library, as he seemed to own every art book ever printed.

Despite having spent a lot of time learning about NZ art and being accompanied by 3 other people who had a pretty good working knowledge of contemporary Kiwi artists, I could only identify makers of a small fraction of the art on the walls and in the storage rooms we were equally free to examine. Here’s the thing: in a private collection, there are no accompanying wall labels. Forget the fact that we have become increasingly dependant on increasingly lengthy labels to explain the conceptual work we encounter on museum and gallery walls – at Rannoch we couldn’t even identify the artist, since a stunningly small percentage of the work was signed on the front. I took home a lesson from this, since I am at best inconsistent about signing my quilts.

We finished our trip with a long wander in the garden, ‘chockers’ (as in chock full) with sculpture. Arranged around the periphery of the house and strewn down a steep ungroomed hillside we would not have been allowed to clamber down in the US (liability laws being what they are) were sculptures in various states of decay. It made me ponder, not for the first time, on the nature of collecting and the psychological triggers of the collector. These sculptures, some hidden beneath burgeoning undergrowth, some furry with moss, some simply gasping at overexposure to sun and wind and rain, were expensive works by major NZ artists. Like the paintings and indoor sculptures gathering dust in the dark in the house’s attic and basement, these pieces seemed like out of favor orphans who had been taken in by Wallace in a fit of enthusiasm and then allowed to wander off into the gloaming after his interest had waned. As I lifted a trailing branch to view a sculpture, I thought of the “in the collection of” listing on my own resume, and my friends’ excitement when a famous collector acquires their work. I couldn’t help but wonder if our art is rolled up under a collector’s bed, forgotten and camouflaged by dust bunnies.

Why do we make art, and why do others collect it? Vanity, hubris, obsession—art can be made and bought for less than laudable reasons. But I think the basic -- and most profound-- reason we make art is to tell our stories and the most altruistic reason people collect it is to preserve them. I think I’d rather have my quilts stored under a collector’s bed than my own. Especially a collector who opens his home to others interested in the worlds artists create.

Week 4.5

Feijoas, a small green fruit ripening on Auckland bushes now, are the New Zealand equivalent of cilantro. Like cilantro, the feijoa’s flavor and its perfume are inextricably linked, and like cilantro, people either love them or hate them, looking for unguarded verandahs for drive-by drop-offs if they have feijoa bushes in their yards. Although I think of them as New Zealand fruits, I’m told they are native to South America, like the kumara that became a staple of the Maori diet after one Polynesian sailor or another brought the sweet potato back from his overseas travels.

Yoke, the friend I’m staying with during this part of my visit, weekly lends her kitchen for photo shoots for the New Zealand Herald’s food and style insert. Her daughter is the staff photographer, so I have had fun looking for examples of Yoke’s collection of silverware and serving dishes in the Wednesday paper. This week I got to meet the food editor as she arrived to work up next week’s featured recipes – all involving feijoas delivered by the newly hired PR person for the Feijoa Grower’s Association, the long-lost friend of Yoke’s whom she had run into just the week before in our weekly community choir practices, but that’s a whole other Auckland small world story.

Although I can riff on recipes, I don’t have the palate or food imagination to think of combining food flavors I have haven’t yet tasted together. So when Amanda told me about the feijoa, smoked fish, and Vietnamese mint salad she was making for this week’s shoot, and confessed she’d never made it before but was confident “it would be lovely,” I knew I was out of my depth. She also made feijoa jam, stewed feijoas and cream (which reminded me of the Rosalind Russel line from “My Sister Eileen,” when she reads the recommendation on the back of a free cereal box: “Tastes delicious with peaches and cream,” and then asks, “What doesn’t?”), and feijoa fruit salad with green and red guavas.

The selection of tropical fruit that’s now in season – feijoa, guava, passion fruit—has contributed to the summery taste of my stay. It’s lovely to leave Portland in March, when I’m sick of apples and pears and bananas, and arrive in time for the last of the stone fruit and berry season, along with the harvest of passion fruit and feijoas. It’s also good to know the Hood strawberry season will be arriving soon after I return. Like the feijoa, putting down roots in South American and the South Pacific, I am happy to enjoy the best of both my worlds.